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Anti-roll bars are structures in automobiles that aim to increase the driving comfort by reducing the vibration of the roll angle during the vehicle’s movement. It also assists the self-steering behavior of the vehicle chassis, improving the vehicle’s drivability. Finite Element Method (FEM) is a known method to discretize a flexible structure mathematical model in space (that is represented by a partial differential equation, or EDP) in order to obtain a numerical solution given the initial and contour conditions. This model frequently includes parameters that are random variables or stochastic process (which is an indexed set of random variables) and in order to cope with this problem, it is necessary to use a stochastic extension of the FEM method known as the Stochastic Finite Element Method (SFEM). This method merges the Finite Element Method with stochastic numerical methods like Monte Carlo, Polynomial Chaos and Karhunen-Loève expansion.

This paper presents a SFEM model of the structural flexibility of the anti-roll bar (a distributed parameter model), as well as its integration with the lateral dynamic of the vehicle (that is a concentrated parameter model). The global computational model can be solved using numerical software, like MATLAB/Simulink. The sources of randomness are parameters in the model (specifically, the total mass of the vehicle’s chassis) and the soil profile, that is modeled by a stochastic process. This profile is discretized in the random domain by a Karhunen-Loève series. It also reviews the vehicle roll dynamic and describes the fundamental concepts used by the Stochastic Finite Element Method applied to dynamic modeling of flexible structures. The influence of the system is illustrated through simulation examples comparing a model with anti-roll system to another without it.