Passenger comfort analysis in an automotive considering a magneto-rheological damper based suspension

Passenger's comfort in moving vehicles depends on the quality of the ride. The major cause of discomfort is the vibration transmitted to passengers due to the road irregularities. For a comfortable ride on a vehicle, vibration must stay within prescribed standards. In the present work, an attempt was made to show that, the vibrations can be limited with the use of Magneto-rheological (MR) dampers for varying road profiles than the passive damping methods. MR dampers are semi-active control devices that use MR fluids to produce controllable damping force as they are known to exhibit nonlinear behaviour. Multi body dynamic studies were done to study the response of the system using a quarter car model. In this paper, passive damping (viscous damping) was considered at natural frequency of 1.012Hz, the response of damping was observed after 10s and the acceleration was found to be 6m/s2. When MR damper is employed as the magnetic force increases, the response of the damping was better than the passive damping, at 1.2A it comes down to 0.55m/s2, and the vibration gets dampened after 1.75s. Hence, from this study it is concluded that the MR damper can be employed in automobile for better ride comfort. © 2016. MechAero Foundation for Technical Research & Education Excellence.