Performance Assessment of Active Aerodynamic Surfaces for Comfort and Handling Optimization in Sport Cars

This paper investigates the use of active aerodynamic surfaces (AASs) to enhance the ride comfort of sport vehicles. AASs are constituted by airfoils that are properly placed on the vehicle chassis, and whose angle of attack can be modulated at high frequency (10 Hz). Thus, AASs can be used to generate a lift force that helps in controlling the vertical acceleration of the sprung mass without negatively affecting the unsprung mass. Thanks to this property, AAS systems can overcome the tradeoff between comfort and road holding. In this paper, a control system is presented along with a detailed analysis of several design choices (controller bandwidth, surface size, and actuator requirements). Furthermore, the effect of several environmental factors is considered: 1) vehicle mass; 2) vehicle velocity; and 3) road roughness. A specific analysis shows that the proposed system can be integrated with classical semiactive suspension control algorithms. The system is validated on a complete vehicle model, showing improvements of the order of 30% in ride comfort with no negative effects on road holding.