In this paper, 2-DOF vehicle suspension system with a semiactive on-off damper was studied for improving the ride comfort. It is known that a nonlinear hydraulic damper, which generates force proportional to the square of the relative velocity, can describe the actual fluid resisting type damper more properly than the traditional viscous damping model. On the other hand, hydraulic damper adoption in analysis makes the system nonlinear and causes difficulties to get the system response. In this work, time domain direct integration method was used to calculated system displacement and acceleration. First of all, the response of the suspension system experiencing a given road profile was optimized by Lagrangian multiplier method within the range of given damping coefficients. The appropriate on-off damping values were obtained by averaging the already calculated optimum damping coefficients from Lagrangian techniques.
The criterion to control the on-off mechanism was determined by examining the suspension efficiency. It was found that the best out of practically applicable criteria is following the sign ( positive and negative ) of the multiplication of relative displacement and velocity.
Judging from the theoretical calculations, it was proved that the semiactive on-off damper can increase suspension efficiency as much as 6-11% in object function.
