A Study Of Virtual Test On The Performance Of The Shock Absorber

The shock absorber is one of the most significant assemblies of the vehicle suspension, which has great impact on ride performance, handling stability and safety of the whole car. It is of great meanings if its performance could have been foreseen and used as references during the designing phase.And this paper deals with the issue. The structure of a commonly used type of twin tube hydraulic shock absorber was studied and analyzed. A virtual prototype of the damper has been built in EASY5 software for simulation. In order to validate the effectiveness of the established damper model, both the simulation results and the experiment results which were conducted with real shock absorbers according to the national standard of shock absorber test. Using statistical method to linearize the non-linear damping force received from the virtual model. Having established a quarter vehicle model for vibration analysis with random road profile and the damping force produced by shock absorber virtual prototype as input. The virtual experiment has been done for this purpose. The results of this virtual experiment indicate that the performance of the studied damper could inhibit the vibration caused by the road roughness effectively. The ride performance would be improved on the basis of good handling stability and safety.Another virtual experiment was conducted to test and evaluate the heat dissipation characteristics of the shock absorber. Different cases were discussed in terms of wind conditions outside. Several parameters were predicted such as heat power, heat value etc. The case of how the damping force characteristic altering with the oil temperature has been studied and the ultimate temperature of thermal equilibrium was obtained as well. The consequence of this virtual test showed that the shock absorber could work under a stable circumstance with good heat dissipation.