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Electromagnetic Automobile Suspension Demonstrated
cylonlover writes "Last December at the Future of Electric Vehicles conference in San Jose, a representative from The Netherlands' Eindhoven University of Technology presented research that his institution had been doing into a novel type of electromagnetic vehicle suspension. Now that a test car equipped with the suspension is about to appear at the AutoRAI exhibition in Amsterdam, the university has released some more details about the technology. For starters, it is not only electromagnetic but also active, meaning that it doesn't just mechanically respond to bumps in the road, but is controlled by an onboard computer. It is claimed to improve the overall ride quality of cars by 60 percent." That seems an awfully exact figure — I'm not sure any two people would ever agree even about the exact same car's "overall ride quality."
Actually us pavement engineer types do this all the time. Basically the input to the function is the profile of the pavement measured by a pavement profilometer which essentially captures pavement elevation about every 6 in or so. (http://www.dynatest.com/functional-rsp.php) Then this profile is fed through an algorithm that models the response of a hypothetical "quarter car" (basically a spring above a tire to simulate the amount of movement experienced by something on the axle). This measurement is called the International Roughness Index and it has been correlated to "Ride Quality" perceived by highway users. It is not a perfect measurement but it is used quite frequently to help decide pavement projects. if you are more interested.... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Roughness_Index http://www.umtri.umich.edu/content/LittleBook98R.pdf So for this thing they would need some other model to calculate the "movement" induced by road profile on the vehicle much like IRI. Once you have that you could correlate it to Ride Quality, have they done that? That is the question...