Vehicle vibration analysis of the quarter-car model considering tire-road separation

A real suspension system has inherent nonlinearities that are often ignored when modeling, and a more accurate system than the traditional ones must be able to account for these effects. This chapter examines one such nonlinearity which is the possible separation of the tire from the ground. To accomplish this aim, a nonlinear model will be formulated using nondimensionalization which would incorporate the tire-road discontinuities. The number of input dimensionless parameters is minimized by developing the differential equation system. Once the tire loses contact with the ground, the separation time is a crucial criterion for evaluating ride comfort. Thus, the examination of the time response, frequency response, and fraction of the separation time has been sensitively conducted. The separation dynamics are numerically investigated to determine which values of suspension characteristics can postpone and avoid the tire-road separation phenomenon and eliminate the potentially dangerous vibrations. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022.