This research has been conducted to design upright parts of hand-made vehicles with the purpose of reducing material and machining cost while ensuring structural safety. Aluminum knuckles were modelled with three parts in order to enhance design flexibility as well as to reduce CNC machining cost. A vehicle model was constructed in CAD program and simulated in ADAMS View in order to estimate joint forces developing during 20 degree step steering condition at 60km/h. The joint forces obtained in the vehicle dynamics simulation were used for the structural analysis in ANSYS and dimensions of knuckle parts were adjusted until the lowest safety factor reached 2.0. The weight of knuckle decreased by 50% compared to the previous version that was designed without the structural analysis. The overall manufacturing cost decreased by 33% due to the reduction in the material as well as the CNC machining effort.

An automotive company have developed corporate requirements for vehicle characteristics for dynamic response which must be met before a product is delivered to the customer. To provide early predictions of vehicle handling performance, prior to the construction and testing of prototypes, it is necessary to predict dynamic behavior due to road inputs. This paper describes an application of the “virtual proving ground” approach for vehicle handling characteristics for a vehicle on proving ground road surfaces. I developed generation program of the virtual road profile for vehicle dynamics simulation.