A design approach for hydraulic interconnected suspension systems

Hydraulic interconnected suspension (HIS) systems represent a burgeoning technology in the automotive industry, notably due to their abilities to reconcile the well-known trade-off between ride comfort and handling performance. Numerous design possibilities for HIS systems exist, considering various hydraulic components (such as orifices, accumulators, and pipelines) and their topological connections. At present there is a lack of a systematic design approach for such systems. Traditional design approaches focus on making piecemeal modifications to existing designs, neglecting a substantial catalogue of fundamentally different and transformative schemes. Consequently, significant potential performance enhancements remain untapped. To address this limitation, this paper proposes a novel systematic design approach for HIS systems, which enables a wide range of design possibilities to be explored, and an optimal configuration to be identified. The efficacy of the methodology is demonstrated via a case study. Given a predefined design complexity, a beneficial single-axle HIS system is constructed, which can achieve a 15.6% ride comfort performance improvement while maintaining roll-control performance compared with the traditional system.