Ride Comfort Performance Improvement of Electric Vehicle (EV) Conversion Using SAS-Controlled Active Suspension System

Abstract

This paper presents vehicle’s ride comfort performance evaluation after the conversion into an electric vehicle (EV) and the possible ride comfort improvement by an active suspension system have been investigated. The evaluations were done using a validated 7 degrees of freedom of vehicle’s ride model. The mathematical modelling of the vehicle’s ride as well as its validations was developed in order to predict the vehicle’s ride behaviours. The model was then integrated with the active suspension system in order to improve the EV conversion’s ride comfort performance. It was found that the modifications towards an EV conversion do not affect vehicle’s ride comfort performance significantly, except it changes only the vehicle’s vertical displacement, pitch rate and pitch angle responses. However, further application of an active suspension system in EV conversion was found to be able to improve all of the observed responses for ride comfort performance of an EV conversion by overall improvement of 71.1 percent.