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Writer's pictureVatsal Jain

Understanding Vehicle Dynamics

When you are riding your vehicle i.e your car ,bike ,truck or bicycle you encounter various challenges such as sharp cornering, hard braking, sudden acceleration, speed breakers ,puddles etc. As a car driver you should be amazed when you will see that behind all these lots of physics and mathematics is involved . What is vehicle dynamics ? This is the simple word to understand but lots of physics is involved in this. Vehicle dynamics is the study of vehicle in motion and its behavior when it interacts with the driver ! Vehicle dynamics is also the study and verification of the safety and comforts of the occupants or passengers sitting inside the vehicle.

Vehicle dynamics can be studied by two approaches:- 1. Empirical 2. Analytical Empirical approaches generally is the non engineering approach,this is based on trial and error methods and this method often lead to failures. Analytical approach is the engineering approach, this is based on mathematical modeling. There are some set of mathematical equations that follow the laws of physics and you give some inputs to those equations to get the outputs or Responses from them . Analytical approach is the perfect way to study the vehicle dynamics.


Vehicle dynamics has three major categories:-

Longitudinal dynamics Study of vehicle motion in straight line path i.e while braking, accelerating ,checking the straight line stability of car .







Lateral dynamics Study of vehicle motion in lateral direction i.e while taking turn,overtaking the car. This involves the generation of lateral forces on tires of your vehicle.






Vertical dynamics Study of vehicle motion in vertical direction i.e encountering speed breakers, puddles etc . Vertical dynamics tells about the Ride of vehicle and the Road holding of vehicle.










Check my video on youtube on introduction to Vehicle dynamics !


 

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