Truck suspension design to minimize road damage

The objective of the work described in this paper is to establish guidelines for the design of passive suspensions that cause minimum road damage. An efficient procedure for calculating a realistic measure of road damage (the 95th percentile aggregate fourth power force) in the frequency domain is derived. Simple models of truck vibration are then used to examine the influence of suspension parameters on this road damage criterion and to select optimal values. It is found that to minimize road damage a suspension should have stiffness about one fifth of current air suspensions and damping up to twice that typically provided. The use of an anti-roll bar allows a high roll-over threshold without increasing road damage. It is thought that optimization in the pitch-plane should exclude correlation between the axles, to ensure that the optimized suspension parameters are robust to payload and speed changes. A three-dimensional 'whole-vehicle' model of an air suspended articulated vehicle is validated against measured tyre force histories. Optimizing the suspension stiffness and damping results in a 5.8 per cent reduction in road damage by the whole vehicle (averaged over three speeds). This compares with a 40 per cent reduction if the dynamic components of the tyre forces are eliminated completely.