ABSTRACT
ABSTRACT: Designing the characteristics of the dampers of the front and rear suspension of a vehicle involves the consideration of several conflicting demands with respect to its ride, handling and safety properties. Besides predefined evaluation criteria, chosen excitation spectra will predetermine the resulting damper setting. Moreover, the interaction of the suspension dampers with passive springs, bump-stops, tyres and anti-roll bars adds to the complexity of passive damper design. Based on a multibody system model of the vehicle and sectionally linear damper characteristics, some main relations of the comprehensive effects involved are recovered and illustrated in a way, that may allow for the determination of simple, yet realistic damper characteristics at an early stage of vehicle design, when virtual prototypes of the vehicles are required or at hand only.
1 INTRODUCTION
