Simulation and comparison of automotive shock absorbers

Abstract

A suspension system of a vehicle is equipped with a spring, in combination with a shock absorber. The soaring need to enhance the comfort characteristics, and the higher imposed safety requirements have resulted in a rapidly gaining importance of the vehicle suspension system. One of the recent developments to improve the riding comfort is using a semi-active shock absorber Instead of a passive shock absorber. In this master thesis, the effectiveness of an ideal semi-active shock absorber will be analyzed and compared with an ideal passive shock absorber. In order to be able to achieve this goal, simulation software MSC ADAMS is used. The simulation software will use a simulation model of a full-car suspension system to predict the results. This model is run on three different types of roads: a country road, a city road and with the ISO Lane Change maneuver. Methodologies to analyze the simulation results are introduced, these are the vertical acceleration and normal forces for the city and country road, and lateral acceleration and roll angle for the lane change maneuver. The results show that semi-active shock absorbers, if they are well tuned, can improve the performances compared to the passive shock absorber.