Steering systems take a significant role on safety and comfort in road
vehicles. Driving pleasure is highly associated with the forces on the steering
wheel, which are depending on road conditions, speed of the vehicle, hydraulicelectric
power steering assistance and the angle of steering wheel. These forces
are transmitted over the tires and the steering system to the steering wheel.
Steering system test benches are used for checking durability, evaluating
performance and investigating characteristics of these systems. Steering system
tests are mostly done as subjective testing which depend on test drivers and
vehicle level field testing. Extensive subjective testing results in a waste of
valuable development time and introduce high test and development budgets
with the actual increase of vehicle variants especially those with electric
steering assist functions. Due to these facts steering system testing and
development moves to the laboratories and Hardware-In-The-Loop testing
devices to overcome these situations.
Within the scope of this work, to simulate the real kinetic and kinematic
relations on a steering system, 3 axis and 5 axis steering system test benches
are designed and constructed in OTAM Laboratories as a modular structure in
order to research and develop various steering systems independently from
vehicles. In addition to the durability, performance and characterization tests
for a steering system, a driving simulator can also be coupled with the whole
system to perform driver-in-the-loop tests. The driving simulator setup enables
to check the subjective feeling of different setups with respect to different
hardware components and steering-ECU software evaluation steps.