The paper deals with some important problems of determination of mass, damping and stiffness matrices using identification of linear vehicle dynamic models. The body of the vehicle is considered as distributed parameter system which can be described by partial differential equations and the parameters represent mass, stiffness and damping distributions. Using finite element methods, the body dynamics can be modelled as concentrated parameter systems given by second order vector differential equations. For this case the directly identified parameters of discrete models are sophisticated functions of physical parameters of continuous models. Therefore, it is very important to choose the suitable discrete model class for an effective and reliable solution for the above problem. In the paper a special time- domain maximum likelyhood method is applied to estimate the coefficients in the transfer matrix of the body and to ensure a direct relationship between the transfer matrix, the model and physical parameters of the body.
Abstract