Virtual development of ride and handling characteristics for advanced passenger cars

Advanced requirements for quality and functions, reduced development time, and increasing international competition motivate fundamental changes of the development processes. This puts much attention on the potentials of numerical simulation, i.e. experiments on the virtual product, while experiments on real prototypes will always remain an important part of the development process, for example to fulfill legal requirements, to achieve parameters for the simulation work, and to validate intermediate results and of course the final tuning. One step towards the virtual development of ride and handling characteristics of passenger cars is to achieve accuracy of simulation results which can be compared to what can be achieved with carefully selected experiments. This paper will present the state-of-the-art of current simulation technologies, their already available potentials and some remarks on current limitations. With this type of advanced simulation technologies, engineers are enabled to develop complex mechatronic chassis systems like active suspensions or stability control systems in relatively short periods of time to a high degree of maturity. A second use of these virtual prototypes is for extensive parameter studies or even optimizations, which will also give more insight in the complex nonlinear interactions of the chassis systems. This can even yield to a complete change of development processes from an analytical incremental setup to more target driven work.