Fully automated car suspension simulation process in pSeven Enterprise

September 17, 2025

Introduction

Suspension design is one of key tasks for automotive manufacturers. Modifying suspension parameters affects not only the kinematics of the car, but also the stress state of the vehicle and driver comfort. These are all key design requirements.

The suspension design process is a multidisciplinary analysis involving different simulation engineers from various departments who use a wide variety of simulation tools.

In OEM enterprises such a complex process usually faces lots of difficulties:

• Ineffectiveness of business processes – a lot of time is wasted on data transferring between different engineers and departments.
• Non-formalized processes – no one knows the process from start to finish, the data exchange formats vary from engineer to engineer – and even over time.
• Human factor – mistakes are made during simulations, as well as data preparation and exchange.
• Loss of expertise – methodologies fail to transfer between generations of engineers. Engineering knowledge is not accumulated, but replaced.

Another problem is that requirement-driven design requires multiple iterations before all requirements are met. Manually choosing design parameters can lead to an inefficient process and a suboptimal result.

pSeven Enterprise transforms complex simulation business processes into automated, multidisciplinary simulation workflows. This transformation formalizes processes, eliminates data transfer errors and accelerates simulation. Furthermore, automated simulation workflows enable parametric, multidisciplinary design optimization.

Problem statement and challenges

The simulation process under consideration is the design of the truck suspension. The suspension design process involves three simulation engineer departments, which exchange data with each other.

Each department is responsible for one type of simulation – and all of them use variety of simulation tools:

• Engineers from MBD (multibody dynamics) department use Adams Car.
• FE analysis department uses Ansys Mechanical for stress distribution evaluation and custom Python scripts to estimate fatigue of the vehicle frame.
• User Comfort and Ergonomics engineers estimate driver comfort using custom Octave script.

Solution

The business process behind truck suspension simulation and analysis is translated to the end-to-end multidisciplinary simulation workflow in pSeven Enterprise (fig. 2).

Each block of the workflow is a nested referenced workflow, corresponding to one of three different disciplines:

• MBD analysis
• Fatigue analysis
• Driver comfort analysis

Each simulation workflow for every single discipline is prepared with the help of pSeven Enterprise low-code instruments and may be reused as a ready tool by itself.

Multibody dynamics

MBD analysis workflow takes all suspension analysis inputs and executes an automated batch simulation of kinematics in Adams Car: the truck with updated suspension damper parameters is driving with constant speed on a given road profile.

Once the kinematics simulation is finished another Adams Car block is executed to post-process results and extract input data for other disciplines:

• Forces on the suspension damper for stress and fatigue analysis.
• Driver seat kinematics for driver comfort analysis.

Fatigue analysis

Two steps are executed sequentially in the fatigue analysis simulation workflow.

On the first step, stress analysis of a suspension beam in Ansys Mechanical is executed: automated batch evaluation over set of loads from Adams Car is performed with the help of specialized pSeven Enterprise integration block. Full model distributions for all stress components and load steps are extracted from Ansys Mechanical in a form of CSV files collection via custom ACT script, executed after the stress simulation is finished.

On the second step, custom fatigue analysis methodology is applied. Full model stress distributions are analyzed in order to locate the FE model node with the most fatigue damage accumulated over the applied load steps. The accumulated damaged value is used to estimate the fatigue safety factor – the key characteristic of the vehicle reliability.

Driver comfort analysis

According to ISO-2631 [1], vibrations exposure can affect driver concentration and comfort – the vehicle construction should be compliant to this standard. Two parameters should be controlled for 8-hours a day vibrations exposure of a human body: weighted RMS acceleration and vibration dose.

These parameters are estimated via simulation workflow for the driver comfort analysis. The time series of the kinematic load on the driver's seat, obtained as a result of MBD modeling in Adams Car, are the initial data for the workflow.

The driver seat kinematics is given as a nonlinear system of differential equations for two-DOF dynamics model according to Rakheja (1994) [2] with implementation in a form of custom Octave script. Specialized Octave integration block with built-in environment is used in the pSeven Enterprise simulation workflow to execute the driver seat dynamics model and estimate key vibration exposure parameters.

Usage scenarios

Once the multidisciplinary workflow is built and validated it’s a ready to use and fully automated tool which represents a fixed and trusted simulation methodology. This methodology may be transferred to end users in run-only mode - so the methodology will be safe from any changes.

pSeven Enterprise technology allows to publish such methodologies as web apps in a centralized library called AppsHub. Access control to such applications can be flexibly set up using the built-in administrative tools.

Multidisciplinary simulation workflow may be easily reused as a reference in the optimization workflow: pSeven Enterprise low-code instruments allows you to setup your optimization study in several clicks and discover the best design.

Benefits

Using pSeven Enterprise technologies for automating simulation business processes brings several benefits:

1. Speed up the design - conduct more simulations in less time. Bring design-by-simulation concept to life.
2. Know your processes – the simulation process is formalized, fixed and safe from loss of expertise. Transfer ready-to-use simulation methodologies through generations of engineers.
3. Improve your planning – formalized repetitive tasks bring you control over the total time consumption of the simulation processes.

References

[1] ISO-2631 Mechanical vibration and shock - Evaluation of human exposure to whole-body vibration.

[2] Rakheja, S., Y. Afework, and S. Sankar. "An analytical and experimental investigation of the driver-seat-suspension system." Vehicle System Dynamics 23.1 (1994): 501-524.