Introduction
Adams Car Ride, part of the Adams
® 2024.1 suite of software, is a plugin to
Adams Car. You can use Adams Car Ride to model and simulate the ride quality of ground vehicles. It contains modeling elements important for ride quality that you can use in Adams Car models. You can also analyze the modeling elements independently from other systems using a modeling-element
test rig.
In addition, Adams Car Ride includes a four-post test rig for four-wheeled Adams Car vehicle models. The four-post test rig supports a variety of time-domain analyses, as well as frequency-domain analyses with Adams Vibration.
See the section
Adams File Types for more information on Adams Car Ride file types.
About Adams Car Ride
Using Adams Car Ride, you can quickly create Adams Car assemblies of suspensions and full vehicles, including Adams Car Ride-provided components important for ride quality, and then analyze them to understand their performance and behavior.
The Adams Car Ride components are:
■General Frequency-Dependent Element
■Single Component Frequency-Dependent Element
■Frequency Bushing
■General Bushing (frequency and amplitude dependent)
■GSE Damper
■Hydromount
You can analyze each component independently from other systems using a component
test rig. You can also use a parameter identification tool for the hydromount component, to quickly determine model parameters that will accurately reproduce test data.
Using the Adams Car Ride four-post test rig for four-wheeled Adams Car vehicle models you can simulate a vehicle traveling over a rough road or simulate a vehicle on a real four-post shaker test machine. You can play displacement or force RPC III file data into the test rig, make your own bumps with table-lookup functions and drive over them, or create and drive over a road-profile surface using a mathematical model for generating road roughness. In the time domain, the four-post test rig also supports sinusoidal sweeps (displacement, velocity, acceleration, or force) and arbitrary Adams Solver functions.
Benefits of Adams Car Ride
Adams Car Ride enables you to work faster and smarter, letting you have more time to study and understand how design changes affect vehicle performance.
Using Adams Car Ride you can:
■Explore the performance of your design and refine your design before building and testing a physical prototype.
■Analyze design changes much faster and at a lower cost than physical prototype testing would require. For example, you can change springs with a few mouse clicks instead of waiting for a mechanic to install new ones in your physical prototype before re-evaluating your design.
■Vary the kinds of analyses faster and more easily than if you had to modify instrumentation, test fixtures, and test procedures.
■Work in a more secure environment without the fear of losing data from instrument failure or losing testing time because of poor weather conditions.
■Run analyses and what-if scenarios without the dangers associated with physical testing.
■Perform a repeatable set of tests on a global basis, ensuring that you work with common data, tests, and, most important, results.
Starting Adams Car Ride
Because Adams Car Ride is a plugin to Adams Car, you first start Adams Car and then load Adams Car Ride.
In the Windows environment, you start Adams Car from the Start button. In the Linux environment, you start Adams Car from the
Adams Toolbar. For information, see the
Running and Configuring online help.
To start Adams Car Ride:
2. From the Tools menu, select Plugin Manager.
3. In the list of plugin names, find Adams Car Ride, and then select one or both of the following:
♦Load - Loads Adams Car Ride in the current session.
♦Load at Startup - Instructs Adams Car to load Adams Car Ride in all future Adams Car sessions.
4. Select OK.
Adams Car loads Adams Car Ride. The interface now includes a new menu, Ride.