Effectively Approaching and Designing a Suspension with Active Damping

This paper discusses how to effectively design and set-up an ideal spring/damper combination in a low-mass open wheeled racecar to properly control vehicle handling and gain optimum performance of the system.

The system that will be discussed is outfitted with a non-parallel, unequal length SLA suspension that was designed and raced at the 2001 Formula SAE competition. The focus of this paper will be more on how to choose an ideal suspension set-up for a low-mass open wheeled racecar, while considering the various variables that can affect the system as a whole. To properly design a suspension, a passive system will be used, and then the performance gains of a semi-active system will be introduced and discussed.