Bifurcation Analysis of a Non-Linear Vehicle Model Under Wet Surface Road Condition.

The vehicles are prone to accidents during cornering on a wet or low friction coefficient roads if the longitudinal velocity (V_x) and steering angle (δ) are increased beyond a certain limit. Therefore, it is of major concern to analyze the behaviour and define the stability boundary of the vehicle for such scenarios. In this paper, stability analysis of a 2 degrees of freedom nonlinear bicycle model replicating a car model including lateral (sideslip angle β) and yaw (yaw rate r) dynamics only operating on a wet surface road has been performed. The stability is analysed by utilizing the phase plane method and bifurcation analysis. The obtained converging and diverging nature of the trajectories (β, r) depicts the stable and unstable equilibrium points in the phase plane. The movement of these points results in the transition of the stability known as bifurcation due to the change in the control parameters (V_x, δ). The Matcont/Matlab is utilized to obtain the bifurcation diagrams and the nature of bifurcations. The obtained results show that a saddle node (SNB) and a subcritical Hopf bifurcation (HB) exists for steering angle (±0.08 rad) and higher than (±0.08 rad) with V_x = (10 - 40) m/s respectively. The SNB and HB denotes the spinning of the vehicle and sliding of the vehicle respectively, thus generating a unstable behaviour. A stability boundary is obtained representing the stable and unstable range of parameters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]