Modeling and simulation of energy harvesting hydraulically interconnected shock absorber

Ride comfort, road handling and fuel efficiency of a vehicle have always been crucial factors during vehicle shock absorber design. This paper proposes and studies a novel energy harvesting hydraulically interconnected shock absorber (EH-HISA) system to improve energy harvesting and ride comfort. A comparison study is done for the dynamic responses and power harvested by the vehicle equipped with EH-HISA and previous design for energy-harvesting hydraulically interconnected suspension (EH-HIS). In addition, the EH-HISA consists of two energy harvesting units compared to four energy harvesting units in EH-HIS, thus reducing the cost and weight of the overall system. A full car model is set up in AMESim to simulate the vehicle over a C class road. The comparison indicates that EH-HISA shows 11% reduction in lateral acceleration of car body center of gravity, during double lane change test over EH-HIS. While the peak roll angle of the vehicle body shows almost similar results of 1.4 degrees for EH-HISA and 1.2 degrees for EH-HIS. The average energy harvested for EH-HISA reaches a maximum value of 230 W and shows an improvement of 222 % over EH-HIS for the same road conditions and vehicle parameters.