NON-LINEAR DYNAMIC ANALYSIS OF VEHICLES USING LARGE FINITE ELEMENT MODELS

Abstract

In the dynamic analysis and design of vehicles the behaviour of suspensions and tyres beyond the linear range is often interesting. In order to get acceptable responses it is necessary to apply large mechanical models with many degrees of freedom. In this paper a computational method and a computer progrc.m, developed for the dynamic analysis of elastic systems containing local non-linearities are presented. The applicability of this method and program is demonstrated by numerical experiments using a 648 degrees of freedom flat-bed truck finite element model.