Non–linear dynamics mechanism of road vehicle at losing stability in critical cornering situations

This paper studies one of the key techniques to estimate a vehicle’s stability limit in critical cornering situations when designing vehicle stability control systems. With this in mind, this study aims to investigate the dynamics mechanism of road vehicle at losing cornering stability in critical situations. In this work, the non-linear dynamics mechanisms of destabilisation in two operating cases, steady-state cornering and non-steady-state cornering, are discussed. For the steady-state cornering destabilising case, the non-linear dynamics feature is characterised by two phases qualitatively. For the nonsteady-state cornering destabilising case, the dynamics mechanism is elucidated from the viewpoint of system state evolution. The results presented in this paper may be helpful for the analysis and design of vehicle stability control strategies.