Adaptive Suspension of Vehicles with Wide Range of Control

In this paper we consider a new design of adaptive suspension systems of vehicles with better technical characteristics and functional abilities in comparison with existing designs. We have developed the following main suspension components of vehicles: a lockable adaptive shock absorber with a wide range of control performance, implementing "lockout" mode by means of blocking adaptive shock absorber, and an elastic element with progressive non-linear characteristic and automatic optimization of localization of work areas. Advantages of our developments in the vehicle suspensions are the following: 1) when the vehicle is in a wide range of speeds in a so-called "comfort zone", we have managed, by applying the non-linear elastic element, to reduce significantly the stiffness of the elastic suspension elements in compare with the regular structures - at least in two times. This means that comfort, smooth motion, high performance the vehicle when driving over bumps are improved in times. Dynamic loads on the crew, passengers, equipment, components and assemblies of the vehicles are reduced in a big extent; 2) stiffness of the non-linear elastic element beyond "comfort zone" is increasing: at first - more than three times as compared with regular elastic elements; and further increasing of the stiffness of the elastic elements is more than 60 times. We have installed the developed design of the suspension on the Russian cars VAZ "LADA-GRANTA" and "LADA-KALINA." In this paper we describe some results of experimental studies. The experimental results confirmed the validity of the theoretical propositions.