Design and Development of Base Valve for a Semi-Active Damper

A semi-active suspension system provides superior safety, ride, and handling performance for a vehicle by continuously varying the damping based on vehicle motions, where semi-active hydraulic damper (SAHD) is the most critical component. Today, SAHD’s are standard in most of the premium segments of vehicles and optional extras in mid-size and compact vehicle segments. Electric vehicles require larger sized SAHD’s to meet heavier vehicle loads and meet ride and handling requirements. The aim of this paper is to highlight the design and development methodology of a base valve for larger bore-size for semi-active hydraulic damper. The workflow follows to present a process for base valve design to meet structural strength and, the key steps of design calculations of the hydraulic performance. The design of the base valve and suction disks architecture was engineered with the aid of Computer Aided simulations. The structural performance was analyzed using the Finite Element Analysis (FEA) and valve hydraulic performance factors were obtained by using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) methods to simulate the physics of hydraulic fluid flow around the base valve assembly using the de-coupled fluid /structure interaction (FSI) method. In this effort, the analytical study was reinforced to identify the critical performance parameters such hydraulic pressure (P) - oil discharge (Q) curve generation and understand the base valve design performance. Furthermore, valve characterization using flow bench testing was conducted to validate and correlate the simulation predictions with prototype samples to increase the confidence level in computer aided simulations.