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The handling quality of a passenger car is noticeably influenced by the structural and functional characteristics of the individual components of the vehicle’s various mechanisms, including the steering, suspension and braking systems. This implies that in designing each of these mechanisms, its contribution to the dynamic behavior of the vehicle should be taken into account.
In this paper the sensitivity of the vehicle’s handling quality to the geometry of a rack-and- pinion steering mechanism, especially to the coordinates of its joints, is analytically studied
Genetic-based approach for
of the joint coordinates is
In the proposed approach, the dynamic equations and kinematics constraints of the steering mechanism are derived and incorporated in a dynamic model of the vehicle. The model is then solved for a step- input to the steering wheel, using MATLAB, and the values of the handling parameters are calculated. An Elitist Genetic Algorithm is used to search the hyper-space of the joint coordinates and to find the those resulting in the best handling quality. The advantages of the proposed method over the classical solution methods are also discussed.