Building a novel dynamics rollover model for critical instability state analysis of articulated multibody vehicles

Articulated wheel loaders in construction industry have poor lateral stability and high rate of accident due to their multibody structure and uneven working fields. In order to realise early rollover warning and active control, it is necessary to explore the mechanism of instability and the change rules of dynamics parameters. This paper proposes a novel dynamics rollover model with 6 degrees of freedom (DOF) for modelling the instability process of an articulated wheel loader. The proposed rollover model is compared with a virtual prototype and a 1:5 scale-down physical prototype under four typical working conditions to verify its reliability, and its accuracy is investigated via a rotation motion under a constant steering angle under the critical state of rollover. Finally, the dynamics rollover model is used to investigate the influence of different kinematic parameters on lateral stability of an articulated wheel loader with steady-state margin angle (SSMA) as stability index.