Dynamics of Amphibious All-Terrain Vehicle’s Chassis Having Vibration Energy Harvesting Dampers

The rural off-road exploiting of amphibious all-terrain vehicles leads to the intensive vibrations of all parts of a vehicle, and specifically of its chassis. The tested amphibian vehicle’s chassis has the lowest natural frequency of 19.34 Hz. The Vibration Energy Harvesting Damper (VEHD) is used for mitigation of chassis vibrations. VEHD provides the mutually interconnected results: a reduction of undesired vibration levels and a generating of the additional electrical power. Newly patented VEHD consists of two main components: Tuned Mass Damper and Generator of Electricity. The perspective feature of proposed VEHD is the ability of effective vibration damping in a broad range of frequencies due to implementation of a control device, while that device is keeping automatically the changing natural frequency of VEHD equals to current frequency of the external force. The mathematical simulation analysis based on parameters of the amphibious all-terrain vehicle chassis is developed. The experiments arranged on recently designed amphibious all-terrain vehicle illustrate the compliance with theoretical predictions, and efficiency of proposed VEHD operating mainly in low frequency interval. An analysis of the dynamical performance of developed VEHD demonstrates applicability of that type of VEHD for all classes of vehicles.