Spring rates to damping ratio??? Anybody know?

[cptsideways]

Is there a chart somewhere or calculator for spring to damping ratios?? can't find anything googling


Is there a formula or something somewhere?

[rcarr]

Major Arthur Mallock was the world renowned expert on suspension, he died in 1993. Even the top Formula 1 engineers looked up to him!

[100SRV]

Hi CPT sideways,
if you are interested I can email you some formulae related to this topic; (I spent quite a bit of time researching suspension and the related mathematics when we raced the Bowler in France). My data covers damping ratio, natural frequency and so on.

PM me if you want to know more.

cheers,
100SRV

[GreenV8S]

cptsideways said:

Is there a chart somewhere or calculator for spring to damping ratios?? can't find anything googling


Is there a formula or something somewhere?

What you're looking for is the formula for the critical damping ratio, which describes the behaviour of a damped osscillating system based on the sprung mass, spring rate and damper rate. However, theory will only get you so far. Dampers aren't perfectly linear, they're usually set up very asymmetrically too, the behaviour of the tyres and bushes makes a huge difference to the frequency response, and most vehicles are damped well under critical. But if you're just trying to find out how much to scale up damper rates when you change the mass, leverage, spring rates etc a little theory will take you a long way.

Edited to add a link:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damping_

Edited by GreenV8S on Monday 26th March 22:29