To Optimize Motorcycle Ride Comfort and Handling Parameters for Inverted Telescopic Suspension 2013-26-0149

Motorcycle segment is growing very fast in India and companies are paying more attention to ride comfort performance of their vehicles, as it is a potential factor for success. The spring and damper characteristics of the suspension needs to be optimised for desired ride quality. Achieving a very good level of ride comfort on rough and smooth terrains combined with an equally good level of handling in the speed range of 20 km/h to 120 km/h is a challenging task as the roads have a mix of both high undulations as well as smooth and flat surfaces on highways. Inverted telescopic front suspension is one of the options engineers look at, to enhance the ride comfort of motorcycles without compromising on the handling behaviour too much.

This paper focuses on the optimization of inverted telescopic suspension system in frequency domain. A quarter car model of suspension system is used to describe the dynamic performances such as ride comfort, road holding and working space on roads. In the model, parameters, including the sprung mass, unsprung mass, suspension stiffness and damping are considered as uncertainty variables. Then, the computational expressions of the dynamic performances in frequency domain for suspension systems with uncertainty variables were obtained. In this study, the correlation analysis of comfort evaluation between road load data and simulation has been conducted and optimized parameter has been arrived.