Kevin Morency, BASc MASc Candidate Motion Research Group Systems Design Engineering Email: kmorency@real.uwaterloo.ca

Research:

Hardware-in-the-loop testing is an exciting way to accelerate the vehicle design process. In this type of testing, some parts are real, while the rest of the vehicle is represented by a mathematical model. If the mathematical model is to interact with the physical parts in a meaningful way, it must be capable of being solved in real-time.

Most commercial multibody dynamics packages assemble the equations of motion numerically at every timestep. This process is too slow for real-time applications.

Over the past several years, the Motion Research Group has developed Maple routines that automatically formulate the governing equations for multibody systems using a graph theoretic method. Because this method is based on linear graph theory, it offers flexibility in the selection of modelling variables. Because this method formulates symbolic equations, repeated terms can be identified and the equations can be greatly simplified before they are solved. The combination of intelligent co-ordinate selection and simplified equations leads to drastically reduced simulation time compared with numerically formulated models.

The goal of my research is to develop reasonably accurate vehicle models that can be solved in real-time. Models of pneumatic tires have been added to the existing Maple routines. Innovative ways of simplifying the symbolic expressions for important tire parameters such as slip angle and camber angle are under investigation. The use of subsystem models to represent suspensions will also be explored.

Since this work is an extension of the existing method of formulating equations for multibody systems, it does not focus on a single vehicle. The code will formulate the equations of motion for any vehicle, given a description of that vehicle as input. It is therefore applicable to a wide variety of problems.

Areas of Study:

• Kinematics and Dynamics of Multibody Systems
• Vehicle Ride and Handling
• Modelling of Pneumatic Tires
• Linear Graph Theory
• Computational Methods for Numeric Simulation

Links:

I have a bachelor's degree in Mechanical / Automotive engineering from the University of Windsor

I am also a member of the University of Waterloo Mini-Baja team, which designs and builds an off-road race car.

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