An Investigation of the Influence of High Performance Dampers on the Suspension Performance of a Quarter Vehicle

An investigation is carried out to determine the influence of dampers on the performance of race cars. The analysis is carried out in four sequential phases: (i) development of analytical damper model, incorporating gas spring, friction, asymmetric multi-stage damping, fluid compressibility and temperature sensitivity; (ii) development of quarter vehicle model, and determination of performance criteria and coefficients; (iii) validation and analysis of results for candidate damper on quarter car simulator; (vi) parametric analysis of damper parameters relative to performance criteria. It is concluded that the performance is sensitive to temperature changes, particularly the gas spring effect, and that asymmetric multi-stage damping provides nonlinear tuning capability of the system.