Currently, a group of scientists consisting of six doctors of technical sciences, professors of South Ural State University (Chelyabinsk, Russia) has completed a cycle of scientific research for creation of adaptive suspensions of vehicles. We have developed design solutions of the suspensions. These solutions allow us to adjust the performance of the suspensions directly during movement of a vehicle, depending on road conditions - either in automatic mode or in manual mode. We have developed, researched, designed, manufactured, and tested experimentally the following main components of the adaptive suspensions of vehicles: 1) blocked adaptive dampers and 2) elastic elements with nonlinear characteristic and with improved performance. Applications of our developed designs are as follows: suspensions of almost all vehicles (trucks, cars, buses and so on), except "waterfowl", and high-speed tracked vehicles, including special purpose and trailers, aircraft for various purposes, rail transport, particularly high-speed one, motorcycles, etc. Application of our designs will allow harmonizing by optimal way the various performance requirements for vehicles, which are often contradictory: requirements on smoothness and comfort ride, rapidity, stability and control, traffic safety, values of dynamic loads acting on components and units of vehicles, stabilization of their movements and body position. In this paper we analyze the main features of the performance of our designs of adaptive shock absorbers and elastic elements, results of our theoretical and experimental studies.
