Effect of Valves Stiffness on the Performance of a Twin-Tube Hydraulic Damper

In this paper, the dynamic behavior of a twin-tube automotive hydraulic damper is studied. A front axle car damper is subjected to experiments in both phases compression and rebound. Accurate CFD simulations are developed to improve the understanding of the performance of the damper by exploring its hydraulic behaviors in transient response. Dynamic meshing is applied to simulate the fluid flow in terms of velocity and pressure distribution in damper chambers. The deflections of base and piston valve membranes respectively in compression and rebound are determined through an iterative method considering the fluid-structure coupling. Numerical results are in good correlation with those issued from experiments. The presented CFD model is a numerical tool if applied can minimize the number of experiments in the step of design and testing of twin-tube dampers.