Stochastic analysis of energy dissipation of a half-car model on nondeformable rough pavement

With a large portion of vehicles still relying on the combustion of petroleum, the transportation sector was reported to be responsible for 27% of the greenhouse gas emissions in the United States in 2015. Within a vehicle, various mechanisms contribute to energy consumption, including tire-pavement rolling resistance and pavement condition. Recently, a stochastic pavement-vehicle interaction model was developed to describe the relationship between the road conditions and energy consumption. However, the investigations on a half-car model seem to be lacking. Thus, this paper presents a stochastic approach to determine the energy dissipated in the suspension of a half-car model on non-deformable rough pavement. The road profile is modeled as a filtered white noise and the input to the rear tire is delayed using an approximation. The resulting system is combined with the vehicle model to yield an augmented vehicle-pavement system. The equation governing the covariance of the response is solved to obtain the energy dissipation of the vehicle. The results of the studies illustrate the efficacy and the flexibility of the proposed approach.