An investigation of a bus’s ride comfort by using the quarter car model with linear asymmetric damper

Abstract

The linear asymmetric damper’s effects on the ride comfort, safety, and handling control were investigated to get full understanding of the suspension system design processes of an inner-city bus. The dynamic responses were analyzed for both two cases of linear symmetric and linear asymmetric dampers using the quarter car model with two degrees of freedom (2 DOFs) subjected to random road profiles and single bump cases of triangular and sine-squared bumps. The obtained results show that the linear symmetric damper performs the same as that of the linear asymmetric one in terms of comprehensive performance when the vehicle is subjected to a random road profile. The ride comfort, the working space have been significantly improved in specific range of velocity in case of the linear asymmetric damper. However, in general, slightly better performance has been obtained in the linear symmetric damper case.