Design And Research On The Regenerative Shock Absorber For New Energy Automobile

Vehicle industry is the pillar industry of China’s industry. Under the background of today’s energy-saving emission reduction and environmental protection, the development goals of automobile in our country is to develop renewable automotive industry in order to realize the sustainable development of China’s automobile industry. The regenerative energy absorber is a new type of shock absorber, which can harvest the part of energy which is dissipated by heat energy, representing the direction of future shock absorber development. In this paper, a novel regenerative shock absorber is proposed to extend the battery endurance of new energy automobile. Under conditions of the energy shortage and environmental degradation these times, this paper remains a high theoretical significance and great economic benefits, which better promotes the sustainable development of Chinese automobile industry. The rest of this paper is organized as follows:Firstly, the structure selection and modular design of regenerative shock absorbers are conducted. Based on the related article review, four types of available structure design are summarized. The structural arrangement and working principle are described while the weak and strong points are analyzed. Then, the designing principle is presented with a new structure design of the regenerative shock absorbers. This scheme utilizes the method of modular design to finish the design of energy input module, transmission module, generation module and energy storage module.Secondly, force analysis and performance simulation of proposed regenerative shock absorbers are presented. A dynamics model is built to theoretically analyze the damping force and feedback properties. The simulating model is set up in Matlab/Simulink when force-stroke and feedback simulation of different input excitation and external loads are conducted. The force-stroke simulation reveals that the damping force is inversely proportional to the input excitation and the regenerative shock absorber meet the requirement of the conventional shock absorber.Finally, the prototype of shock absorbers is manufactured and the bench test is conducted. To testify the feasibility of designed regenerative shock absorbers and characterize their properties, the prototype is manufactured in our experiments. Combined with the bench testing system in MTS laboratory, the force-stroke and feedback experiments of different input excitation and external loads are conducted. The final results accord with the simulation. By making the prototype and testing, the intended functions are achieved with not only the damping function but also regenerative energy harvesting.