Estimation of vehicle inertial parameters
- Publication Type:
- Thesis
- Issue Date:
- 2008
Closed Access
| Filename | Description | Size | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 01Front.pdf | contents and abstract | 1.92 MB | |||
| 02Whole.pdf | thesis | 233 MB |
Copyright Clearance Process
- Recently Added
- In Progress
- Closed Access
This item is closed access and not available.
NO FULL TEXT AVAILABLE. Access is restricted indefinitely. ----- The inertial properties of all vehicles vary over time due to changes in load and load
distribution. These changes in inertial properties affect the vehicles' dynamic
performance, including resistance to rollover, yaw and directional stability, natural
frequencies, damping ratios, vertical acceleration and passenger comfort levels and
maximum available rates of longitudinal acceleration and deceleration. These changes
can also undermine the effectiveness of a vehicle's active control systems, such as
traction control and electronic stability programs.
These vehicle controllers are optimised around a nominal set of vehicle inertial
parameters. The inevitable changes to each vehicle's inertial parameters is likely to
result in a control model that differs to the physical system. Ensuring that the vehicle's
control systems operate using the actual, rather than nominal inertial characteristics, will
improve performance levels with less control effort and faster response times.
Treating the vehicle as a multi-body system and combining this with modal analysis
theory, a methodology has been developed that can identify vehicle mass, centre of
gravity locations and mass moments of inertia. Common, and in some cases existing,
on-board sensors such as accelerometers and gyroscopes are used, which minimise cost
and installation complexity. The method that will be presented in this thesis does not
require the input forces to be known; this differs from the state of the art alternatives
which require the uncertain and varying input forces such as aerodynamic drag, road
friction, road grade or suspension displacement to be measured. This requires additional
sensors such as GPS, tyre force transducers, displacement or pressure sensors. The
reduction in the need for multiple sensors of different kinds yields both cost and
performance benefits. The sensors used are also non-contact, so long-term reliability is
improved.
The response of the sprung mass when the vehicle encounters a series of random road
disturbances is measured using accelerometers or gyroscopes, and provides all of the
data required. From this data the vehicles' free decay response at each sensor location is
extracted. The state variable method is then used to find the state transition matrix.
From the state transition matrix an eigen analysis is performed to extract the natural
frequencies, damping ratios and mode shapes. Some of these detected modes will not be
those of the sprung mass, so a filtering algorithm is used to detect and reject false noise
modes. From this data the system characteristic matrix can be formulated.
A simplified model of the vehicle is then used to find the vehicle inertial properties. It is
assumed that the wheel base, track width and equivalent spring stiffness values are
known. The values of the vehicle dampers are not required. Using a least squares
analysis the values of mass, mass moment of inertia and centre of gravity are varied and
the characteristic matrix found. When the error has been minimised between the
measured and estimated characteristic matrices the best estimate of the mass, mass
moment of inertia and centre of gravity have been found. Simulation and experimental
results indicate that the inertial parameters can be estimated within acceptable error
levels.
Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item:
