Active suspension system to improve ride comfort performance of electric vehicle (EV) conversion

Abstract

This paper presents an evaluation of ride comfort performance of a passenger vehicle when converted into an electric vehicle (EV). The evaluations were done using a validated 7degrees of freedom of vehicle's ride model. The developed vehicle's ride model was used to predict the vehicle's ride behaviours when subjected to random road profiles. The ride model of EV conversion was then integrated with the active suspension system in order to further improve the EV conversion's ride comfort performance. It was found that the modifications of a normal passenger vehicle into an EV conversion do not affect vehicle's ride comfort performance significantly, except the conversion changes only the magnitude of vehicle's vertical displacement, pitch rate and pitch angle responses. However, the integration of an active suspension system in EV conversions ride model was improves the observed responses of EV conversion's ride comfort performance by overall improvement of 65.7 percent.