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Increasingly, product engineers must influence customer satisfaction with robust designs, as opposed to waiting for manufacturing to build quality into a product. To enable and facilitate these efforts, simulation and analysis must be used to guide the system to an improved or even optimal state versus merely a functional one. The integration of Multibody System Analysis (MSA) with Design of Experiments (DOE) creates a powerful combination of tools for thorough investigation of a specified design space, identification of the optimal system configuration, and illustration of the effects of system changes on a given output. This paper demonstrates this approach for a specific output: the vertical loads into a suspension's front strut/shock tower due to a severe pothole road event. This event is designed to test the energy management function of a suspension for severe impact events. Improper energy management leads to excessive forces transmitted to the body structure.

Traditional approaches in designing helical compression springs include references to “active” and “inactive” turns in a coil. “Active” turns in a coil are those which contribute to the rate of the coil, while “inactive” turns are considered “dead” - those turns which do not contribute to the coil's rate. In the 1930's and 1940's much experimental work had been done to provide guidelines for determining the number of “active” turns for cylindrical springs with various end configurations. Since the time of that research, new and complex automotive suspension coil spring shapes have been developed. As a result, many of the empirical rules generated for cylindrical springs are not directly applicable. An empirical approach to quantify end turn effects for various spring shapes and end configurations would be quite cumbersome. Even if data were available, spring designers would have to know a large number of rules and apply them properly.