Jump Phenomena and Bifurcations in Stochastic Vehicle-Road Dynamics

When vehicles ride on uneven roads, they are excited to vertical random vibrations whose stationary rms-values (root-mean-square) strongly depend on the velocity of the vehicle. To investigate this vibration behavior, it is appropriate to introduce road models in way domain which are based on the theory of stochastic differential equations and transformed from way to time by means of velocity-dependent way and noise increments. The random base excitations by roads are applied to nonlinear quarter car models. They lead to stationary rms-values of the vertical vehicle vibrations which become resonant for critical velocities and show jump phenomena similar to those of the Duffing oscillator under harmonic excitations. In the stochastic case, jump phenomena are only observable for narrow-banded road excitations. They vanish for increasing car damping and excitation bandwidth. For efficient simulations of the road-vehicle model, the n state equations are utilized to derive n(n + 1)/2 stochastic covariance equations. For small step sizes, their numerical mean square solutions coincide with the nonlinear results of fix-point iterations obtained when the noise terms of the covariance equations are omitted. It can easily be shown, that this deterministic approach leads to the correct stationary covariances in the linear case. (© 2015 Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)