A subsystem synthesis method for efficient vehicle multibody dynamics

A subsystem synthesis method has been proposed for dynamic analysis of a vehicle multibody system that consists of several subsystems. In this method, each subsystem can be independently analyzed with a virtual reference body. For overall vehicle system analysis, subsystems can be synthesized to the chassis with effective inertia matrix and force vector from the virtual reference body of each subsystem. Using this matrix and vector, a fixed size (6 x 6) of equations of motion for a chassis can be formed and independently solved. There after, equations of motion for each subsystem are solved, subsystem by subsystem. Computational efficiency of the proposed method has been also investigated theoretically through the operational counting method. In order to show the effectiveness of the method, a Short Long Arm (SLA) vehicle suspension subsystem has been analyzed.