Performances of Energy-Harvesting Shock Absorbers on Various Types of Vehicles
Energy-Harvesting Shock Absorber (EHSA), as a large-scale energy-harvesting mechanism for recovering suspension vibration energy, has been studied for years. A design of the regenerative shock absorber with Mechanical Motion Rectifier (MMR) has been proved to be more reliable and efficient. This paper reports a comprehensive study of the influence of MMR-based Energy-Harvesting Shock Absorber (MMR-EHSA) on vehicle dynamics performances. Models of MMR-EHSA and vehicle with MMR-EHSA with two degrees of freedom are created. Simulations are conducted on five typical vehicles, including passenger car, bus and three types of trucks. The ride characteristics of comfort, road handling and energy recovery are evaluated on these vehicles under various MMR rotational inertia and harvesting damping. The simulation results show that MMR-EHSA is able to improve both the ride comfort and road handling simultaneously under certain conditions over the traditional shock absorbers, which broadens our knowledge of MMR-EHSA’s applicable scenarios.