Technical Paper
Complexity Reduction of Damper Base Valve Design Based on Computational and Experimental Validation
2024-04-09
2024-01-2811
A damper is one of the most important elements in a vehicle suspension system. The damper valves are fully coupled to a hydraulic system where the suspension fluid flow interacts with the elastic response of the valve structure. Base valve in the hydraulic damper plays a significant role in compression damping force characteristics of a damper, and therefore designing of the base valve is critical for damping force tuning. Product designers find difficulties and uncertainties when integrating multiple functionalities into a single component as there is limited literature available in this subject. In this paper, the impact of the base valve design complexity reduction is quantitatively analyzed. Current base valve design is restrictive which prevents achieving required compression damping force ranges without a substantial base valve body parts library. In conventional practice, hundreds of different base valve bodies are evaluated for tuning the damper performance.