ADAMS/Car Ride  

ADAMS/Car Ride is a new plugin for ADAMS/Car. It has been developed in cooperation with major automotive manufacturers to allow virtual ride and comfort engineering upfront in the design process within the preferred automotive virtual prototyping environment. One objective of this activity was to elevate the Functional Digital Vehicle solution from handling to ride and comfort testing, including the required elements, models, and event definitions for building, testing, and post-processing within the ride frequency domain.

The ADAMS/Car Ride user scenario is based on the existence of a vehicle virtual prototype. The same model database, which is used for handling, is used for ride and comfort engineering. The interface provides the capability of swapping the mathematical description of the components (dampers, bushings, hydromounts, tires) so that the level of fidelity is suitable for the phenomenon you want to study. The library of detailed components includes:

• A general, GSE-based damper user-defined element (UDE) component, suitable to include a damper model generated from a detailed damper model description through the use of the Mathworks RealTime Workshop capability. For example, a simulink model is delivered with ADAMS/Car Ride to be used with this damper UDE.

• A detailed frequency and amplitude-dependent hydromount model, whose mathematical description has been provided by Audi AG, Germany. This component model is completed with a stand-alone identification tool, which automatically identifies the parameters of the hydromount mathematical model so that its response matches user-specified characteristics of dynamic stiffness and loss angle.

• A detailed frequency-dependent bushing model according to Professor Pfeffer.

• An updated version of the ADAMS/Tire SWIFT Tire model, which allows zero velocity (standing tire) and a moving road (tire on test-rig pad). The use of this feature requires the ADAMS/Tire SWIFT Tire license.

A generic-component test rig is provided to allow you to validate the behavior of the components independently from the complete vehicle assembly. The component test rig allows excitation of from one to six input channels (three translations and three rotations), using either prescribed motion or prescribed force. The test rig supports the automatic evaluation of a component’s dynamic stiffness and loss angle, as a function of either frequency or amplitude.

Once you specify the components in detail, you can run your full-vehicle assembly through a battery of ride and comfort predefined simulation scenarios, enabling you to estimate typical system-level ride metrics. The library of full-vehicle events is based, in this first release, on an extended four-post test rig, which supports analytical (for example, swept sine) as well as measured (for example, in RPC format) excitation inputs. We also included a road-roughness model to generate road profiles in terms of user-specified PSD’s.

For all simulation events, the time-domain approach, as well as the frequency-domain approach, is supported. The time-domain approach, based on ADAMS/Solver, provides accurate results including the effects of nonlinearities in the model, while the frequency-domain approach, based on ADAMS/Vibration, is an efficient tool for conceptual analysis in the modal space.