Turbulent travel speeds in nonlinear vehicle dynamics

Quarter car models of vehicles rolling on wavy roads lead to limit cycles of travel speed and acceleration with period doublings and bifurcation effects for appropriate driving force parameters. In case of narrow-banded road excitations, speed jumps occur, additionally. This has the consequence that the driving speed becomes turbulent. Bifurcation and jump effects vanish with growing vehicle damping. The same happens for increasing bandwidth of road excitations when, e.g., on flat highways there are no big road waves but only small noisy slope processes generated by rough road surfaces. The paper derives a new stability condition in mean. Numerical time integrations are stabilized by means of polar coordinates. Equivalently, Fourier series expansions are introduced in the angle domain. Phase portraits of travel speed and acceleration show new period-doublings of limit cycles when speed gets stuck before resonance. The paper extends these investigations to the stochastic case that road surfaces are random generated by filtered white noise. By means of Gaussian closure, a nonlinear mean speed equation is derived which includes the extreme cases of wavy roads and road noise.