Modeling of a Hydraulic Power Steering System and Its Application to Steering Damper Development

Vehicle performance depends highly on good steering control, which provides an accurate feedback about how the vehicle reacts to the road [2]. There have been many researches on modeling of various vehicle system components to understand the characteristics and dynamics of them.

This paper presents the method of modeling steering system including steering valve, gear, pump and hose using bondgraph technique. This is done by step-by-step use of AMESim^® software, which can solve numerically complex problems that arise in hydraulic systems such as nonlinearity and discontinuity, to each component and its verification. NVH problems such as shudder and dither could be analyzed by the modeling and this is applied to the hydraulic steering damper development, which is installed between the valve and the cylinder tube, to minimize unnecessary vibrations. Simulation results are shown with experiment to demonstrate the benefit of the developed component.