Wheel force sensor
A&D COMPANY, LIMITED

Recent trends in the vehicle development have increasingly focused on improving the fuel consumption. This development is applied not only to powertrain development but also to the total vehicle performance, which includes analyzing the vehicle behavior in the real driving conditions. In order to pursue the fuel efficiency, there are demands for measuring how the vehicle is transferring the power generated from the engine/motor to real road surfaces in various driving conditions.

The Wheel Force Sensor (WFS) measures forces and torques with high accuracy at the vehicle's wheels, which is the vehicle element closest to the road.

The WFS is designed to measure the 6 component forces of the wheel as near as possible to realistic driving conditions. The sensor design achieved both a low weight (sensor unit total weight: 3.6kg) and high stiffness. It also solved many technical issues, such as thermogenic effects under driving conditions, in order to provide high quality measurement data.

The shared force detection method is applied to the WFS and introduces model-based calculation with the DSP (digital signal processing) system. These technologies are applied to the WFS to precisely and independently extract 6 component forces from many types of physically measured data.

In order to apply the shared force detection method, A&D has developed a 6-arm-architecture shear beam spring element and a 4-element shear strain gauge to compose ideal shared force detection bridges. Moreover, with this gauge, ideal temperature characteristics were achieved. Therefore, the WFS has high level of measurement robustness at various driving conditions.
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