A General Multibody Approach for the Linear and Nonlinear Stability Analysis of Bicycle Systems. Part II: Application to the Whipple-Carvallo Bicycle Model

This paper represents the second contribution of a two-part research work presenting the application of the proposed multibody analysis approach to bicycle systems and the relative numerical results found. In this work, a nonlinear multibody model of a bicycle system is developed and implemented to perform a parametric analysis to understand the influence of the variation of the principal model parameters on the system stability under investigation. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, the case study considered in this paper is the dynamic analysis of the Whipple-Carvallo bicycle model. Considering the combined use of a robust numerical technique for nonlinear dynamical simulations with a specifically devised linearization procedure, the effects of the different geometric parameters and inertial properties on the bicycle stability are investigated. The numerical results obtained in this work using the proposed multibody techniques are useful to gain insight information about the dynamic behavior of the bicycle system in a straight motion. The proposed multibody methodology also demonstrated a high potential for analyzing complex multibody mechanical systems in virtue of the generality of the analytical and computational approaches adopted.