Understanding the Inherently Self-Adjusting Mechanism and Load Adaptability of the Mem-Damper

The tapered dashpot (damper) has been the earliest memristor found in the mechanical engineering domain, named mem-dashpot (mem-damper), since the missing memristor was postulated by Leon Chua. In this paper, a displacement-dependent viscous damper device with internal channels is investigated and recognized as a physical realization of the mem-damper by analyzing the mathematical and dynamic relationships of the device’s complementary port variables theoretically and experimentally. A vehicle suspension equipped with a mem-damper is taken as a carrier for presenting load adaptability of the mem-damper. An investigation reveals the inherently self-adjusting mechanism behind load adaptability from the viewpoint of energy storage, that is, a mem-damper with different initial displacement values can be equivalent to a semi-active damper performing an initial-position-dependent damping control strategy. Finally, the load adaptability of the mem-damper is demonstrated through both simulation and experiment of the suspension system with the mem-damper prototype. Due to such load adaptability, the suspension equipped with the mem-damper can offer more constant and smoother ride comfort than the one with the linear damper.