TY - JOUR A1 - Rill, Georg A1 - Bauer, Florian A1 - Kirchbeck, Mathias T1 - VTT - a virtual test truck for modern simulation tasks JF - Vehicle system dynamics N2 - The development of new technologies like advanced driver assistance systems or automated driving requires a flexible simulation environment of sufficient complexity. In general this flexibility is not provided by commercial software packages. This paper presents a three-dimensional and nonlinear hand-made model for heavy commercial vehicles including tractor and trailer as well as tractor and semitrailer combinations that can be used in different simulation environments, as well as in real-time applications. As typical for trucks, the torsional flexibility of the frame and a suspended driver's cabin are taken into account. The design kinematics makes it possible to handle different and quite complex axle suspensions very efficiently. Appropriate force elements are used to model various couplings between tractor and trailer or tractor and semitrailer, respectively. The virtual test truck environment (VTT) coded in ANSI C is extremely portable and can easily be embedded in commercial simulation packages like MATLAB/Simulink. It includes the TMeasy tyre model and offers flexible interfaces to third-party software tools. KW - coupled air springs KW - design Kinematics KW - heavy commercial vehicles KW - MATLAB KW - Simulink KW - TMeasy tyre model KW - vehicle coupling KW - Vehicle modelling Y1 - 2021 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1080/00423114.2019.1705356 VL - 59 IS - 4 SP - 635 EP - 656 PB - Taylor&Francis ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Rill, Georg A1 - Bauer, Florian A1 - Topcagic, Edin T1 - Performance of leaf spring suspended axles in model approaches of different complexities JF - Vehicle System Dynamics N2 - Axles with leaf spring suspension systems are still a popular choice in many commercial vehicles. However, leaf springs are not in perfect conformity to standard multibody vehicle models because they combine guidance and suspension in one single element. Combining standard multibody vehicle models with sophisticated finite element leaf spring models results in rather complex and computing time-consuming solutions. Purely kinematic models, defined by lookup tables or the design kinematics approach, cover only some but not all features of the leaf spring suspension. As shown here, the five-link model, which incorporates a quasi-static solution of the leaf spring compliance, provides a very practical model. It is comparatively lean and provides results of sufficient accuracy in the whole application range. KW - beam-model KW - commercial vehicles KW - design kinematics KW - five-Link model KW - Leaf spring suspension KW - vehicle dynamics Y1 - 2021 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1080/00423114.2021.1928249 VL - 60 IS - 8 SP - 2871 EP - 2889 PB - Taylor&Francis ER -