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WEMOOV: A three-wheeler for urban areas

In a context of technical, ideological, social and political upheavals, the mobility is, today more than ever, deeply questioned. The automotive industry must constantly reinvent itself and, to do so, develops both innovative technologies and the design methods able to optimize them and to integrate them into new solutions. Thus, considering ever more numerous and diversified aspects, the design of vehicles responding to current and future challenges is an ever more ambitious task.

General CAD view of the wemoov vehicle

This thesis aims at proposing a multidisciplinary and integrated design approach, specifically addressed to the conception of road vehicles. Precisely, the strategy consists of the synthesis of automobile suspensions, the optimization of their kinematics in order to obtain the best road performances, while taking the mechanical constraints of design and manufacturing into account.

An algorithm combining several numerical processes based on the multibody formalism allows, first, to satisfy the constraints to which the vehicle is subjected, then to test this vehicle through a hybrid simulator in which transient simulation and steady-state analysis are juxtaposed, and finally, to evaluate it according to the whole of selected criteria. The method enables obtaining judicious trade-off between the exhaustiveness of the tests and the criteria and the computational time and, thus, handling the design process in its wholeness, in a consistent and efficient way.

This strategy has been successfully applied to the design of a new concept of electric unipersonal three-wheeler dedicated to urban mobility: the Wemoov, characterized by its narrowness imposing its tilting in curve. This particular
dynamics has been made possible by the development of an innovative front axle.

Wemoov turning in the round abount at various speed

Contributors

Aubain Verlé, Paul Fisette, Bruno Dehez, Nicolas Docquier.

References

Joint optimization of vehicle dynamics and mechanical design through a multi-body based strategy PhD Thesis, Aubain VERLE, UCL, September 2019

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