Enhanced vehicle shimmy performance using inerter-based suppression mechanism

Shimmy may occur in the vehicle normal driving process, which is a harmful motion and should be controlled in practical engineering. In order to improve the vehicle driving and handling stability, four kinds of passive inerter-based suppression mechanisms are proposed and applied in the vehicle suspension to improve its shimmy performance. The configurations S1 and S2 are composed of one inerter and one damper, which are in parallel-connected and series-connected, respectively, furthermore, an auxiliary spring is added to constitute configurations S3 and S4. Combined with the magic nonlinear tire model, the vehicle shimmy model with four inerter-based suppression mechanisms is established using Lagrange theory, its shimmy performance is studied using bifurcation analysis method, the stable area and limit cycle oscillation (LCO) magnitude of the system are obtained and compared with those of the original suspension system. The effect of the structural parameters of the inerter-based suppression mechanisms on the vehicle shimmy performance is analyzed, and the structural parameter optimization of the inerter-based suppression mechanism is investigated. The results show that the only parallel-connected and seriesconnected configurations S1 and S2 have little improvement effect on the vehicle shimmy performance. As the configurations S3 and S4 are used, the unstable area dominated by left and right steering shimmy reduces, the shimmy occurred vehicle velocity range becomes narrower and the maximum LCO magnitude of the front wheel swing motion becomes smaller, which suppresses the vehicle shimmy effectively and clarifies the benefits of the inerter and the necessity of adding the auxiliary spring. In addition, larger inertance of the inerter and smaller stiffness of the auxiliary spring is beneficial to improve the vehicle shimmy performance. The optimized structural parameters of the configurations S3 and S4 are obtained, which maintain the vehicle shimmy system stable, and further shorten the time for the vehicle shimmy system to reach stability. Therefore, the inerter-based suppression mechanism can effectively restrain the vehicle shimmy motion and give guiding significance for the design of vehicle shimmy suppression mechanism.