Automation and Optimization of the Design and Development Process for a Formula Student Racing Car Suspension

The design and the development of modern suspension systems is a complex process covering several different engineering domains and disciplines. Among others, this includes vehicle dynamics simulations, tyre data analysis, 1D-lap time simulations, 3D CAD design and structural analysis including collision detection. Taking into account that the overall vehicle and suspension development including all these different disciplines is performed by several engineering departments, the design automation by process digitalization is a means to minimize the manual workload for this complex engineering design and development task. The paper illustrates how the generic suspension design and development procedure can be almost fully automized with the help of so-called graph-based design languages and an associated compiler and can be applied to a concrete Formula Student racing car. It is shown how the therefore necessary digital consistency of data, digital continuity of processes and digital interoperability of all the engineering software tools along the product life cycle (PLC) can be achieved and guaranteed. In order to automatically design and develop a suspension system for a Formula student racing car, an inner design loop for the simulation of the designed suspension system properties including a 1D-lap time simulation as well as an integrated 3D shape optimization of the modelled anti-roll bar geometry including automated collision detection, is created first. Then an outer optimization loop for the optimization of the vehicles’ kinematics using a particle multi-swarm optimization algorithm is created in a second step. Since this combined process of an inner design loop embedded into an outer optimization loop is fully machine executable, a lot of different design variants can be analyzed automatically in a short amount of time. This leads in terms of design quality, design time and design cost to an optimized, much faster and less costly design procedure for suspension systems.