Self-powered magnetorheological dampers for motorcycle suspensions

Abstract

Dampers are the parts of suspensions which improve the ride comfort and the safety of vehicles including motorcycles. Magnetorheological dampers are very attractive for motorcycle suspensions, because of their controllable properties and their fast responses. Considerable energy is wasted owing to the energy dissipation by dampers encountering road irregularities and accelerating processes during everyday use of motorcycles. In addition, the current magnetorheological suspension systems depend on the power supply of batteries. Therefore, in this paper, a self-powered magnetorheological damper for motorcycle suspensions is proposed and implemented for the first time. It can convert the wasted mechanical energy into useful electrical energy to power itself. There are great merits in this such as energy saving, independence of extra batteries and less maintenance in comparison with conventional magnetorheological suspension systems, while keeping controllable performances. A customized prototype of the self-powered magnetorheological damper that is compatible with a motorcycle is developed and actually implemented in a motorcycle. Modelling for the self-powered magnetorheological damper is developed and validated by laboratory testing. Laboratory testing showed that the self-powered feature works well to generate the electrical power and to vary the magnetorheological damping force. Preliminary system-level testing showed that a self-powered magnetorheological suspension results in a better ride comfort, compared with that of a magnetorheological suspension without power generation. The results showed that implementing self-powered magnetorheological dampers in motorcycle suspensions is feasible and beneficial.

Modelling, validation and parameter sensitivity of regenerative hydraulic-electric shock absorber

“…Overall, the aforementioned findings indicate that the techniques to recover suspension energy have considerable potential for converting vehicle vibration energy, which is normally wasted as heat, into electricity. Therefore, various types of regenerative shock absorbers have been proposed, such as linear electromagnetic ones (Zhang, 2010; Zhu et al , 2012), ball-screw ones (Liu et al , 2017; Kim et al , 2016), rack–pinion ones (Guo et al , 2016; Chen et al , 2018) and hydraulic-electric ones (Chen et al , 2018; Fang et al , 2013a, b). However, Gupta et al showed that the power density of electromagnetic-coil shock absorbers is insufficient for vehicles, meaning that they cannot provide enough damping (Gupta et al , 2006).…”

Development of an optimized game controller for energy saving in a novel interconnected air suspension system

“…The researchers studied the roll, 13–15 pitch, 16,17 elimination torsion, 18 and vibration isolation characteristics 19,20 and stability 21,22 in the air suspension field. Energy saving is a goal for many scholars in different fields of automotive engineering such as the transmission system, 23–26 driving cycle, 27–29 suspension system, 30–32 magnetorheological dampers, 33 energy harvesting, 34 and so on. Sun et al 30 declared that the interconnected system causes energy reduction due to not using compressor.…”

Effects of Winding Cylinder Materials on Dynamic Performances of a New MR Damper

“…The developed MR damper was tested on the test rig, the experimental results showed that the developed MR damper can not only achieve the ability of the relative displacement sensing, which can serve as displacement sensor, but also produce large controllable damping force. Chen and Liao [15], [16] designed a type of function-integrated MR damper, which integrated a power source, a displacement sensor and a damper into one device. This structure would produce the electrical energy from the working environment and can feedback the dynamic data to the control system.…”