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Conventional viscous shock absorbers, in parallel with suspension springs, passively dissipate the excitation energy from road irregularity into heat waste, to reduce the transferred vibration which causes the discomfort of passengers. Energy-harvesting shock absorbers, which have the potential of conversion of kinetic energy into electric power, have been proposed as semi-active suspension to achieve better balance between the energy consumption and suspension performance. Because of the high energy density of the rotary shock absorber, a rotational energy-harvesting shock absorber with mechanical motion rectifier (MMR) is used in this paper. This paper presents the assessment of vehicle dynamic performance with the proposed energy-harvesting shock absorber in braking process. Moreover, a PI controller is proposed to attenuate the negative effect due to the pitch motion.

Energy-harvesting from vehicle suspensions has attracted a lot of attention recently due to its potential to recover large amount of kinetic energy which is traditionally wasted in oil shock absorbers, besides it can improve the ride comfort and road handling at the same time. Rotary electromagnetic mechanism has been a popular solution in the design of energy-harvesting shock absorbers and recently an innovative energy-harvesting shock absorber based on so-called mechanical motion rectifier (MMR) has been proposed, which converts the irregular bi-directional suspension vibration into unidirectional motion of the generator. Though it may offer advantages of higher mechanical reliability and harvesting efficiency, its influence on the whole vehicle dynamics is not known yet due to the nonlinearity of the MMR shock absorber.

This paper introduces two new types of basic components (an Electro-Hydraulic Tube and a Hydraulic Tube) which when connected in an appropriate manner can control flow and pressure for many applications; in addition, one of the devices is readily interfacable to a microprocessor for external control. Some background information about the basic concept and the operation of the two components is introduced. Some of the experimental characteristics will be illustrated and several basic circuit examples will be presented to show how the concept can be implemented. The Electro-Hydraulic Integrated Block (EHIB) and Circuit (EHIC) will be introduced followed by a discussion of the advantages and potential of the EHIC concept.