A Novel Acceleration Pedal with Variable Damper in Electric Vehicle for Avoiding Misstep Accident Based on Magnetorheological Theory

The active safety technology is one of the key issues for any automobile, which has attracted much more worldwide attention. In this paper, a novel structure of acceleration pedal with variable damper is developed to enhance the active safety ability of electric vehicles, where the magnetorheological (MR) theory and finite element method were employed. Considering the influence of driver’s misstep on the accelerator pedal, the coupled characteristics of magnetic-fluid-structural fields were analyzed. Results show that the states of coupled fields may change rapidly and the damping force can respond in time, once the misstep behavior occurs for the acceleration pedal. To verify the results in multi-physics coupling analysis, the kinetic model was constructed by combining COMSOL software and ADAMS software, and the motion characteristics of the novel device in our study were also obtained, which reflected the proposed pedal may respond in time and may prevent the misstep accidents in time.