Active suspension parameter optimization in a quarter car model with Altair Activate

Hello there,

We are Jacopo Ferretti and Rosario La Rocca, two italian students from EVE (Electric Vehicle Engineering) master degree program at the Muner university.

During the course of vehicles dynamics form our university we were asked to come up with an interesting project, that would have been focused in the simulation of a car part that we have seen during lectures using Altair Activate software. Today we are here writing this few line because we are particularly proud of the results, so we decided to share it to the Altair community!

The project consists in a suspension comfort evaluation for an electric citycar. To understand it, a quarter car model was implemented in Altair Activate software.

The car chosen is the Italian Fiat 500e, for which we evaluated it’s comfort with the “normal” configuration (motor in the front hood) , comparing it with a proposed “in-wheel motor” configuration. Many more details and information are available in our pdf report (there are not may pages, so it won’t be too long to be read).

Altair Activate, in conjunction with Modelica, turned out to be an useful and simple tool for this case study: using that we have implemented the quarter car model, and we were able to obtain the best suspensions parameters possible thanks to the bobyqa optimization tool.

We are sharing with you the report with all the model files trough the GitHub repository that you can find HERE. We decided to make the project open source, so anyone interested in can download it and make whatever modifications possible. You can also download the Activate files and the pdf report here on the attachment, but for more information please refer the the more complete and up to date github repository.

If you have any suggestion, modification, or curiosity, please leave a comment down here. In case you want to contribute to this project, please share your fork or send us a pull request.

In case of doubt don't hesitate to contact us!

https://github.com/mrjacopong/Active_Suspensions_W_Altair

The two models:

The suspension sytem:

The active suspension PID optimizer: