Regenerative shock absorber for hybrid cars

All vehicles use suspension system. The suspension system mainly consists of a mechanical spring and a damper. The damper dissipates the mechanical energy into heat and thus damps down the vehicle oscillations. In a bid to reduce the vehicle emissions, many technologies are being thought to reduce energy losses and also recover energy from the energy losses if any. One such technology is regenerative braking where the heat lost due to braking is being recovered, converted into electricity and the onboard batteries are charged. Similarly, in a shock absorber, the mechanical energy being converted into heat, instead of wasting this energy it can also be recovered as electricity and the onboard batteries can be charged. This concept of recovering energy in a shock absorber is known as regenerative shock absorber.

The objective of this project is to design a regenerative shock absorber which can harness the energy. In the present work, a regenerative shock absorber is modeled and analysed for emf generated using Ansoft Maxwell and a physical model was built to validate the model.

A regenerative shock absorber model with NdFeB magnet as core and three piston stacked generated 12 volts AC operated at a speed of 1 m/s and the physical built based on this computational model developed 2 volts when operated at the same speed but with steel as core. The difference emf generated is due to the steel core. Since the voltage generated is lower than battery charging voltage, newer concepts have to be thought of to increase the voltage levels.