Comfort analysis based on vehicle onboard measurements

In the last years, the importance of ride comfort is gaining more and more attention in the automotive industry. This heightened awareness has spurred a substantial influx of efforts aimed at enhancing the overall riding experience and a large number of improvements it has been made through qualitative and quantitative test. The purpose of the thesis is to explore the potential of using wheel force transducers to assess Comfort performance by means of a qualitative and quantitative analysis of an experimental dataset and an attempt to set possible applications with added value in relation to the state of the art of comfort analysis methodologies within vehicle dynamics field. The aim of this thesis is to provide data by means of experimental analysis and to compare them with various test tracks. The tests focused mainly on the longitudinal and vertical dynamics of a fully instrumented SUV. It should be noted that the instrumentation used was to investigate the handling of the car. Moreover, the analysis has been done when all the data were already collected, without the possibility to do more tests. The outputs were also computed followed by signal processing using MATLAB software. Results suggest that the Wheel Force Transducer have significant potential and can provide a type of data with a different information content than the current state of the art that could be led to further enhancements on the ride comfort analysis. A further outcome of this thesis is to identify limitations of WFT uses in comfort, define specific improvements (vehicle setup, testing plan, sensor setup, track diversity) to enrich the quality of future analysis, and propose possible applications facing not only comfort analysis but also tire and vehicle modelling.