Performance evaluation and parameter sensitivity of energy-harvesting shock absorbers on different vehicles

ABSTRACT

Traditional shock absorbers provide favourable ride comfort and road handling by dissipating the suspension vibration energy into heat waste. In order to harvest this dissipated energy and improve the vehicle fuel efficiency, many energy-harvesting shock absorbers (EHSAs) have been proposed in recent years. Among them, two types of EHSAs have attracted much attention. One is a traditional EHSA which converts the oscillatory vibration into bidirectional rotation using rack-pinion, ball-screw or other mechanisms. The other EHSA is equipped with a mechanical motion rectifier (MMR) that transforms the bidirectional vibration into unidirectional rotation. Hereinafter, they are referred to as NonMMR-EHSA and MMR-EHSA, respectively. This paper compares their performances with the corresponding traditional shock absorber by using closed-form analysis and numerical simulations on various types of vehicles, including passenger cars, buses and trucks. Results suggest that MMR-EHSA provides better ride performances than NonMMR-EHSA, and that MMR-EHSA is able to improve both the ride comfort and road handling simultaneously over the traditional shock absorber when installed on light-damped, heavy-duty vehicles. Additionally, the optimal parameters of MMR-EHSA are obtained for ride comfort. The optimal solutions (‘Pareto-optimal solutions’) are also obtained by considering the trade-off between ride comfort and road handling.

KEYWORDS:

• Energy-harvesting shock absorber
• mechanical motion rectifier
• MMR
• vehicle dynamics
• inerter
• Pareto optimisation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

The authors gratefully acknowledge the funding support from Virginia Commonwealth Research Commercialisation Fund, Hubei Key Laboratory of Advanced Technology and Hubei Collaborative Innovation Centre for Automotive Components Technology. The authors S. Guo and Lin X. are grateful to the financial support from China Scholarship Council for them to conduct research as visiting scholars in L. Zuo’s lab.