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Influence of Engine Torque on Vehicle Ride Comfort: Proceedings of the

International Conference, ICERA 2018

Chapter · January 2019

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-04792-4_48

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 Influence of engine torque on vehicle ride comfort

Nguyen Khac Tuan1, Vu Van Hai1 and Hoang Anh Thai2

1 Thai Nguyen University of Technology, 666 Tich Luong ward, Thai Nguyen province, Viet
Nam
2Lao Cai Vocational Training College, Bac Cuong, Lao Cai city, Lao Cai province

Abstract. The purpose of this article is to evaluate the effect of internal combus-
tion engine torque on the ride comfort of automobile. A dynamic model of auto-
mobiles with a 4WD transmission system is built. The dynamic simulation of the
system is done with the help of Matlab/Simulink software. The root mean square
value of the vertical acceleration (arms) at the vehicle's center of gravity is chosen
as the criterion for evaluating the ride comfort of the automobile. The influence
of cylinder number and engine throttle level on the ride comfort in different op-
erating conditions of vehicle was analyzed. Calculation results for 4WD vehicle
show that, when the engine is operating in full throttle mode, the value of arms is
increased by about 9,1% compared to the case absence of engine torque; with the
same throttle level and the same engine power, the more cylinder engine has, the
better the ride comfort of the car.

Keywords: engine torque, simulation, ride comfort, 4WD vehicle, dynamic

model.

1 Introduction

Recently, with the rapid development of automotive technology and manufacturing,

the performance of Noise, Vibration and Harshness (NVH) is received more and more
attention. The performance of NVH is an important indicator to measure the quality of
automobile. How to improve ride comfort have become a crucial content during car
design. Viewing from the full vehicle system, there are two major sources which cause
the automobile vibration. One is the random road excitation in the process of driving;
the other is the excitation during engine working [1-5,9,15,17,18].
There have been many studies on the effect of excitation from internal combustion
engine (ICE) to the vehicle ride comfort. However, these studies focused on finding the
way for isolating the vibration of the engine. When building the vibration model of the
vehicle with regard to the influence of vibration from the engine, it is often considered
the engine has a considerable mass and linked with the chassis by the engine suspen-
sion. The optimal researches of the engine suspension are presented in [10-12].
Analysis the works studying of vehicle vibration [1-12], shows that there is only a
few research on the effect of oscillation of engine torque on the ride comfort of vehicle.
One of the first vehicle dynamic model with a combination of engine vibration and
2

vehicle vertical vibration is proposed by Sytovich I. S. [1]. The vehicle dynamic model
is considered three mass including a sprung mass of the vehicle body and two unsprung
masses of the axles and the powertrain system is considered fifteen mass which is
equivalent to fifteen mass of the flywheel. However, the vehicle dynamic model has
lost sight of the suspension damping coefficients and moment of inertia of vehicle body
about the horizontal axis. Base on this vehicle dynamic model, afterwards many re-
searchers have developed for the different powertrain model [1-5].
The objective of this paper is to develop a dynamic model of 4-wheel drive (4WD)
vehicle and a simulation method that allows study of the effect of engine torque on the
vehicle ride comfort under different working modes and with different structural pa-
rameter of the engine. For this purpose, a dynamics model of vehicle with 11 DOF of
4WD vehicle were developed, the root mean square value of the vertical acceleration
at the vehicle's center of gravity is chosen as the criterion for evaluating the ride comfort
of the vehicle, Matlab/Simulink [8] software is applied to solve the mathematical model
describing dynamic of vehicle.

2 Vehicle dynamic model

2.1 Dynamic model of 4WD vehicle

The dynamic model using to study the influence of engine torque on 4WD vehicle
ride comfort is composed of vehicle suspension model and transmission system as show
in figure 1.
L
l1 z0 l2
z1 z2
m1 I8, 8 m2

I5 k 12
c s1 k s1 c s2 k s2
k 12
k 45
k 35 c 45
1 mu1 c 35 T2 mu2 2
I3 T1 I4
q1 c c24 q2
w1 kw1 I6 c 23 I7 cw2 kw2
k 23 k24
I2
c 12 k 12
l1 Te

Fig. 1. Dynamic model of 4WD vehicle

Among it, ms1 and ms2 are the sprung mass; mu1, mu2 are unsprung masses of the
vehicle; kw1, kw2 are the stiffness coefficients of tires; ks1, ks2 are the suspension stiffness
coefficients; cw1, cw2 are the damping coefficients of tires; cs1, cs2 -the suspension damp-
ing coefficients; L is wheelbase of vehicle; l1 and l2 are coordinates of the vehicle's
center of gravity; I1 is moments of inertia of the part rotation of engine and gearbox, I2
is moments of inertia of the distribution box; I3, I4 are moments of inertia of the front
 3

wheels and the rear wheels; I5 is moments of inertia of the flywheel is equivalent to the
mass of the forward motion of the vehicle; I6 and I7 are moments of inertia of the front
axle and the rear axle, respectively; I8 are moment of inertia of vehicle body about the
horizontal axis; z0, z1, z2, ζ1, ζ2 are the vertical displacements of sprung and unsprung
masses; φi are the angle displacements of the masses Ii; cij and kij are the damping co-
efficient and the stiffness coefficient of the part of transmission (i, j=1-8).

According to figure 1, the vehicle vertical vibration dynamic equation is:

1  Te  M 12  / I1 ; 2  M 12  M 23  M 24  / I 2 ;

3  M 23  M 35  T1  / I 3 ; 4  M 24  M 45  T2  / I 4 ;
  M  M  / I ;   M  M  / I ;
 5 45 35 3 6 23 68 6
(1)
7  M 24  M 78  / I 7 ; 8  M 68  M 78  l1 Fs1  l2 Fs 2  / I 8 ;

z0  Fs1  Fs 2  / m;  1  Fs1  Fw1  / mu1 ;  2  Fs 2  Fw 2  / mu 2 ;
 

 z1  z0  l18 ; z 2  z0  l28
M  c      k    ; M  c        k      
 12 12 1 2 12 1 2 23 23 2 3 6 23 2 3 6

M 24  c24  2   4  7   k 24  2   4   7 ; M 35  c35 3  5   k35 3  5 


M 68  k68  6  8 ; M 78  k78  7  8 
  s1 1 1 s2 
 F  c z    k z   ; F  c z    k z   
 s1 s1 1 1 s2 2 2 s2 2 2

   
 Fw1  cw1 1  q1  k w1  1  q1   0; Fw 2  cw 2 2  q 2  k w 2  2  q2   0

In (1) the excitation sources including external forces acting on system: Te is exci-
tation from engine torque; T1, T2 are the total motion resistance torque of the front
wheels and rear wheels and q1, q2 are excitation from road surface roughness.

2.2 Excitation from torque of internal combustion engine to the vehicle

Fig. 2. Simscape model of four-cylinder engine [8]

There are many different methods to determine the torque of the internal combustion
engine such as method harmonic analysis, method of using experimental formula,
graphical method, simulation method [6,7,13] ect. This article uses simulation method
with the help of the Simscape tool in Matlab. Figure 2 shows a block diagram of the
engine model using to determine the engine torque. The input parameters of the engine
model include: number of cycles, number of cylinders, cylinder diameter, piston stroke.
The output variables of the model are engine speed we and engine torque Te. Physical
signal port Th is the engine throttle level as a fraction between 0 and 1. This fraction
4

corresponds to the percentage of full power generated. The block uses the physical sig-
nal input whenever the pressure lookup table in the block dialog box is parameterized
only in terms of the crank angle.

Fig. 3. Relationship between speed, torque Fig. 4. Engine torque under the same throttle
of ICE and throttle level level (Th=0.5) of the ICE with different of
cylinder number

Using the model shown in Fig. 2, it is possible to determine the engine torque
according to the variation of structural parameters of engine and throttle level [8]. Fig-
ures 3 and 4 show the calculation results of the engine torque depending on the throttle
level and cylinder number of the engine.

2.3 Excitation from road roughness to the vehicle

In the International Road Roughness Test [14], the roughness of the road is defined
as the deviation of the road from the ideal plane along the running direction of the
vehicle. The power spectral density function of road can represent the distribution of
road roughness energy in the spatial frequency domain, using the following formula as
the fitting expression:
W
n (2)
Sq  n   Sq  n0   
 n0 
In this formula: n is spatial frequency (m-1); n0 is reference spatial frequency,
n0=0.1(m-1); Sq(n0) is the road power spectral density at the reference spatial frequency
and called the road roughness coefficient. Its value depends on the road grade; W is the
frequency index, the frequency of the slope of the double logarithmic coordinates,
which determines the frequency structure of the road power density.
The road surface roughness is assumed to be a zero-mean stationary Gaussian ran-
dom process. It can be generated through an inverse Fourier transformation:
N
qt    2S q n i n cos2n k t   i  (3)
i 1

where  i is random phase uniformly distributed from 0 to 2.

Thus, based on above equation, a simulation road model was built in Simulink. The
curve of road excitation Class-C according to ISO 6088 is shown in Figure 6.
 5

To investigate the effect of torque of internal combustion engines to the vehicle ride
comfort, the authors analyzed the vertical vibrational acceleration (a) at the center of
gravity of the vehicle and its root mean square values (arms) based on International
Standard ISO 2631-1(1997) [16] when vehicle and internal combustion engine working
in different modes. The determination of a is done by solving the system of equations
(1) with the help of the Matlab/simulink software.

3 Simulation and results

In Figure 1, the Simulink model simulates the effect of ICE torque on the ride comfort
of the 4WD vehicle. Road type is chosen according to ISO standard. Engine parameters
as follow: number of pistons i=4; offset angle vertor γ=[0.0, 180.0, 360.0, -180.0] deg;
cylinder bore D=0.1m; piston stroke S=0.06; piston rod length L=0.1m; number of
stroke per cycle n=4; pressure parameterization by crank angle; crank angle vector θ=
[-360.0, -90.0, -30.0, 10.0, 30.0, 90.0, 160.0, 360.0]; Throttle level Th=0.5. The param-
eters of transmission and vehicle are referenced from the works [1,2,5].

Fig. 5. Simulink simulation block diagram Fig. 6. The curve of road profile according to
for the 4WD vehicle ISO 6088 standard [5]

a) b)
Fig. 7. Simulation results when vehicle moves on the road class C at speed of 20km/h:
vertical acceleration (a) and root mean square of vertical acceleration (b)
6

Figure 7 shows the calculation results of vertical vibration acceleration for the 4WD
vehicle equipped with 4-cylinder engine when vehicle moves on the road ISO C class,
gearbox position in 5th at speed of 20km/h. Obviously, when the engine torque is ap-
plied, the vertical acceleration value is increased. However, it can be seen that the main
factor effect on vertical vibration of the car is the excitation from road surface rough-
ness. The difference in values of root mean square of vertical acceleration in two cases
with and without effect of engine torque (figure 7b) is about 9.13%. Perform a similar
calculation for the case 4WD vehicle with 8-cylinder engine, we get the difference of
9.08%.

a) b)
Fig. 8. Relationship between az, arms and the number of cylinder while the vehicle is standing
still and engine is operating in full throttle mode

Figure 8 shows the calculation results of vertical acceleration and the root means of
it while the vehicle is standing still, the engine is operating in full throttle mode. The
author performed simulations vibration of vehicle in three cases with the same engine
power and different cylinder numbers: case 1 – vehicle equipped with a four-cylinder
engine; case 2–six-cylinder engine and case 3 –eight-cylinder engine (figure 8). It can
be seen from the figure 8 that, when the number of cylinder increases, the uniformity
of the engine torque increases, the higher the number of cylinders, the lower the vertical
acceleration and its root mean square of the car.

In order to investigate the effect of throttle level on the vehicle ride comfort, the
authors carried out the simulation with three different throttle levels while vehicle stand
still. It is observed from figure 9 that, when changing the engine throttle level will
change the vertical vibration acceleration of the vehicle, the larger the throttle level, the
greater the vertical acceleration of the automobile and vice versa.
 7

Fig. 9. The change of vertical acceleration and its root mean square of 6-cynlinder engine cor-
responds to the different throttle level while vehicle stand still

4 Conclusions

In this paper, the simulation the influence of engine torque of a 4WD vehicle on the
vehicle ride comfort was conducted. For this purpose, a dynamics model of vehicle
with 11 DOF were developed. The simulation results with the help of Matlab/Simulink
- software, showed that:
1. The torque of the internal combustion engine has a relatively large impact on
the vehicle ride comfort. When the engine is operating in full throttle mode, the
value of root mean square acceleration is increased by about 9,1% compared to
the case absence of engine torque;
2. With the same engine power, the higher the number of cylinder, the better the
ride comfort of the vehicle.

Acknowledgments

The work described above was performed in the support of Thai Nguyen University
of Technology for the scientific project 2017 year. The authors also
would like to thank for the contribution of the colleges at the Faculty of Automotive
and power machinery Engineering of Thai Nguyen University of Technology.

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