Improving High Speed Road-Holding Using Actively Controlled Aerodynamic Surfaces

Semi-active and active suspension technologies have shown that vehicles road holding can be enhanced, but any such improvement implies decreasing the overall comfort. In this paper, we introduce the use of active aerodynamic surfaces to improve vehicle road-holding without affecting comfort. An H∞ closed-loop controller is developed to minimize the tire deflection variations, which are responsible for the vehicle bad road holding. The controller is designed on a quarter-car model. Extensive simulations on a multi-body vehicle simulation suit assess the performance of the proposed control scheme, and an exhaustive sensitivity analysis shows the role of road roughness, velocity and airfoil design