Active tilt control system (ATC) is considered to be a prominent technological advancement in the three wheelers (3Ws), which improves the drive and comfort capabilities of 3W, leading to additional benefits of excellent maneuverability and small track width. An experimental prototype along with its simulation model is developed, to study the impact of the tilt actuation control system (TAS) and active steer (AS) system on the overall drive experience and stability improvement. A steering direct tilt control (SDTC) strategy is implemented on the vehicle, which allows stable operation of the system during the entire drive range. A transfer function (TF) of the TAS is estimated from the measurements on the prototype using the system identification tool. The derived TF is then utilized to investigate the response of the complete vehicle in terms of vehicle trajectory, perceived acceleration and load transfer across the rear wheels during the double lane change (DLC) and constant turn maneuvers. The results of the analysis indicate that the perceived acceleration felt by the driver is up to 45% less than the lateral acceleration along with up to 36% reduction in load transfer across the rear wheels.
Traffic congestion, pollution due to vehicular emissions and fuel energy crises are the major problems that have inspired research for the design of efficient and smaller vehicles as a regular mode of transport with a significantly lower carbon footprint. With an increased dependency on certain countries for fuel energy, electric mobility has been encouraged by policy makers so that national interests are not compromised. At the same time, enhanced standards of living have resulted in a demand for safer and comfortable transport. All of these factors have led to a need for a mode of transport that is efficient, compact, safe and comfortable. Electric three-wheelers are seen as one of the promising options that fits all of these requirements. Due to their high propensity to rollover during cornering, however, the use of three-wheeled vehicles (3Ws) is limited to low-speed applications for cheap transport. Recent developments in the field of rollover mitigation through active tilt control mechanisms indicate that the future mode of transport will be more exciting than the existing one. This paper is a review mainly focused on the recent technological developments in active-tilt-controlled three-wheeled vehicles. This paper gives a detailed review of the methodologies chosen, control strategies adopted, types of vehicle chosen for test/simulation, mathematical models applied, key findings and future work proposed to address the dynamics-related issues of tilting 3Ws.
Small sized three wheeler electric vehicles (EVs) are gaining popularity in many developing countries because of its low cost operation and excellent manoeuvrability. However, usage of such a 3Ws usage is limited to low speed application such as last mile public transport. Vehicles with such configuration are not well accepted for personal mobility. If the safe speed of such a vehicles are improved, such a vehicles can also become viable to personal transport. Active tilt control (ATC) systems are seen as one of the possible solution to improve safe speed of narrow track 3Ws.Literature indicates that many attempts have been made for establishing active tilt control system on 3W vehicles for enhancing stability of ATC vehicles and promising results were obtained. This paper presents simulation based analysis of the ATC 3W electric vehicle. This work is part of full scale experimental prototype development for the narrow track ATC 3W vehicle with one wheel in front configuration. The primarily focus of this work is to address vehicle dynamics and trajectory related issue of the tilting 3Ws.
A multi-body model of ATC 3W vehicle using single track lateral dynamic model with nonlinear tire characteristics was prepared in SimMechanics. The lateral dynamic outputs in terms of the trajectory followed by vehicle were compared for the constant steering inputs given to non-tilting vehicle, tilting vehicle with direct tilt control (DTC) system and tilting vehicle with Steering direct tilt control (SDTC) system. Two critical driving scenarios of U-turn and Lane change manoeuvre are analyzed. It is observed from the results that there is certain trade-off in selecting a tilt actuator and controller so as to minimize the jerks in the perceived acceleration due to high gain and minimize the tilt angle error to ensure proper stability improvement. It is also identified that the controller must be tuned to the predictable trajectory control, in addition to the main task of reducing the load transfer across the rear wheel axle. The model presented in the paper is used to understand the performance of DTC and SDTC control strategies during potentially dangerous manoeuvres. The desired path following ability of the vehicle is the main measures considered for the analysis.
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