Passive vehicle suspensions employing inerters with multiple performance requirements

This paper investigates passive vehicle suspensions with inerters by considering multiple performance requirements including ride comfort, suspension deflection and tyre grip, where suspension deflection performance is novelly considered which is formulated as a part of objective functions and a constraint separately. Six suspension configurations are analyzed and the analytical solutions for each performance measure are derived. The conditions for each configuration to be strictly better than the simpler ones are obtained by presenting the analytical solutions of each configuration based on those of the simpler ones. Then, two stages of comparisons are given to show the performance limitations of suspension deflection for passive suspensions with inerters. In the first stage, it is shown that although the configurations with inerters can improve the mixed performance of ride comfort and tyre grip, the suspension deflection performance is significantly decreased simultaneously. In the second stage, it is shown that for passive suspensions with inerters, suspension deflection is the more basic limitation for both ride comfort and tyre grip performance by doing comparisons among mixed ride comfort and suspension deflection optimization, mixed ride comfort and tyre grip optimization, and mixed suspension deflection and tyre grip optimization. Finally, the problem of mixed ride comfort and tyre grip performance optimization with equal suspension deflection is investigated. The limitations of suspension deflection for each configuration are further highlighted. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.