The goal of this paper is to discuss the critical aspects of damper tuning for production vehicles. These aspects include ride and handling performance attributes, damper basics, conflicts in achieving desirable results, tuning philosophies, and the influence of the damper design.
The marketplace has become increasingly competitive. Customer preference, cost, mass and regulatory pressures often conflict. Yet each year more vehicles are required to do all these things well. Damper tuning can play a significant role in resolving these conflicts.
Although many papers have been written on the theory behind damper design and capabilities, there has been very little written about the techniques of tuning dampers for production vehicles.
This paper attempts to discuss the critical aspects of damper tuning for production vehicles in four sections. The first section discusses the performance attributes of ride and handling. The second section provides a basic understanding of dampers. The third section discusses some of the conflicts in achieving performance results that will please a broad band of customers. Finally the fourth section discusses the design and tuning enablers to overcome these inherent conflicts.
