Development of the smooth orthogonal decomposition method to derive the modal parameters of vehicle suspension system

In this paper, the smooth orthogonal decomposition (SOD) method is developed to the light damped systems in which the inputs are time shifted functions of one or more random processes. An example of such practical cases is the vehicle suspension system in which the random inputs due to the road roughness applied to the rear wheels are the shifted functions of the same random inputs on the front wheels with a time lag depending on the vehicle wheelbase as well as its velocity. The developed SOD method is applied to determine the natural frequencies and mode shapes of a certain vehicle suspension system and the results are compared with the true values obtained by the structural eigenvalue problem. The consistency of the results indicates that the SOD method can be applied with a high degree of accuracy to calculate the modal parameters of vibrating systems in which the system inputs are shifted functions of one or more random processes. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.