Assessment of Ride Comfort and Braking Performance Using Energy-Harvesting Shock Absorber

Conventional viscous shock absorbers, in parallel with suspension springs, passively dissipate the excitation energy from road irregularity into heat waste, to reduce the transferred vibration which causes the discomfort of passengers. Energy-harvesting shock absorbers, which have the potential of conversion of kinetic energy into electric power, have been proposed as semi-active suspension to achieve better balance between the energy consumption and suspension performance. Because of the high energy density of the rotary shock absorber, a rotational energy-harvesting shock absorber with mechanical motion rectifier (MMR) is used in this paper. This paper presents the assessment of vehicle dynamic performance with the proposed energy-harvesting shock absorber in braking process. Moreover, a PI controller is proposed to attenuate the negative effect due to the pitch motion. The simulation result implies that the active damping control based on the MMR shock absorber can optimize the performance indices for both the suspension and braking system during the braking process. An average total power amount of 29.4W can be harvested with deceleration level of 0.4g on the Class C road.