Performance Degradation of Hydraulic Vehicle Dampers

A hydraulic damper is a crucial part of a vehicle suspension system. Its performance directly affects the suspension system's safety and reliability. In this paper, a testing system was developed to determine remaining useful life of twin-tube dampers, which includes hydraulic damper, displacement sensor, force sensor, temperature sensor, NI data acquisition card and a PC with LabVIEW software. Based on the experimental results, a performance degradation exponential model was developed that demonstrates that the damping coefficient decreases during the cycling operation. This study is useful for predicting the remaining useful life of a damper in a vehicle suspension system.