Kinetic Energy Recovery System for Vehicle Suspension

Abstract

Vehicle is a very important part of human life. It makes transportation easy. Although there have been many inventions and ongoing researches on increasing engine efficiency, there exist other opportunities to increase the comprehensive performance of vehicles. In application, various losses occur in different sections of the vehicle. They can be identified as frictional losses, losses due to air drag, losses due to vibrations, thermal losses, etc. One of the losses is the dissipation of energy by the shock absorber or suspension of a vehicle. Moving vehicles can expend a significant amount of energy in undesirable vertical motions that are induced by road bumps and much of that is dissipated in conventional shock absorbers as they dampen the vertical motions. This paper relates to an energy recovery model, more particularly, to an apparatus that uses the kinetic energy of automobile suspension and stores it in the form of electrical energy. The proposed study uses a rack and pinion mechanism to utilize the linear motion of a telescopic suspension. The arrangement works such that the linear movement of the suspension is converted to rotatory motion. The rotational mechanical energy generated by the mechanism is used to produce electrical energy by a dynamometer and is stored using a power bank. The study validates the practicality of the system and prove it to be an effective clean energy generation mechanism for future automobiles.