Performance Evaluation of a Novel Hydro - Pneumatic Suspension System of a Heavy Truck on Ride Comfort

The purpose of this work is to evaluate the performance of novel hydrfo-pneumatic suspension system (HPSs) in comparison with traditional hydro-pneumatic fsuspension system (HPSs) of a heavy truck in the direction of improving vehicle ride comfort. Firstly, the nonlinear dynamic models of the traditional and novel HPS systems are set up to determine the vertical forces. And then, the vertical forces are connected with a 3-D nonlinear dynamic model of heavy truck with 10 degrees of freedom under random excitation of road surface. The root mean square (RMS) acceleration responses of the vertical cab, pitch and roll angles of the cab (awzcb , awfcb and awtcb ) based on the International Standard ISO 2631-1: 1997 are chosen as objective functions. The study results show that the awzcb , awfcb and awtcb values with novel HPSs reduce by 28.27%, 28.32% and 6.89% in comparison with traditional HPSs when vehicle moves on ISO class D road surface at vehicle speed of 50 km/h and full load. Finally, the ride performance of novel HPSs is verified and compared and evaluated with traditional HPSs under different operating conditions and the evaluation results are also indicated that the ride performance of a novel HPSs is better than the traditional HPSs under survey conditions.