Safety and Lateral Dynamics Improvement of a Race Car Using Active Rear Wing Control

As the forward speed of a car increases, the safety of the vehicle and the driver becomes a more significant concern. Active aerodynamic control can effectively enhance the lateral stability of high speed vehicles over tight cornering maneuvers. A split rear wing has been proposed. By means of manipulating the attack angles for the right and/or left parts of the split rear wing, a favorable yaw moment may be achieved to ensure the lateral stability of the vehicle. However, active control of the split rear wing has not been adequately explored. This paper proposes a novel active split rear wing, which can improve the lateral stability over tight cornering maneuvers, and will not degrade the longitudinal dynamics of the vehicle. A Linear Quadratic Regulator (LQR) based controller for the active split rear wing is designed using a linear vehicle model. In order to examine the performance of the active split rear wing, Numerical simulation is carried out using the LQR based controller and a yaw-plane vehicle model designed in MATLAB. The effectiveness of the proposed active split rear wing is demonstrated by the results derived from the numerical simulation.