Narrow Tilting Vehicles

Nowadays, the use of small vehicles is spreading among urban areas and one sort of these vehicles are three-wheeled vehicles (TWVs) which can be competitive with four-wheeled urban vehicles (FWVs) in aspects such as smallness, simple manufacturing, and low tire rolling resistance, fuel consumption and so on. The most critical instability associated with TWVs is the roll over. In this study a tilt control mechanism has been modelled which can reduce the danger of roll over by leaning the vehicle towards the turning centre in order to decrease the amount of lateral load transfer (LLT), and by doing so, system combines the dynamical abilities of a passenger car with a motorcycle. A 3 degree of freedom vehicle model is simulated at constant speed in MATLAB-Simulink environment and a fuzzy algorithm is developed to control such a non-linear system with appropriate tilting torque. Results are interpreted in presence and absence of controller with different longitudinal speeds and steering inputs; the results are also compared to behaviour of a similar FWV and this is concluded that the tilt control system could countervail deficiencies of the TWV compared to the FWV.

Keywords: Three-Wheeled Vehicle, Tilt Mechanism, Roll Over, Fuzzy Control, Vehicle Dynamics