Vibration Performance Analysis of a Mining Vehicle with Bounce and Pitch Tuned Hydraulically Interconnected Suspension

Abstract The current investigations primarily focus on using advanced suspensions to overcome the tradeoff design of ride comfort and handling performance for mining vehicles. It is generally realized by adjusting spring stiffness or damping parameters through active control methods. However, some drawbacks regarding control complexity and uncertain reliability are inevitable for these advanced suspensions. Herein, a novel passive hydraulically interconnected suspension (HIS) system is proposed to achieve an improved ride-handling compromise of mining vehicles. A lumped-mass vehicle model involved with a mechanical–hydraulic coupled system is developed by applying the free-body diagram method. The transfer matrix method is used to derive the impedance of the hydraulic system, and the impedance is integrated to form the equation of motions for a mechanical–hydraulic coupled system. The modal analysis method is employed to obtain the free vibration transmissibilities and force vibration responses under different road excitations. A series of frequency characteristic analyses are presented to evaluate the isolation vibration performance between the mining vehicles with the proposed HIS and the conventional suspension. The analysis results prove that the proposed HIS system can effectively suppress the pitch motion of sprung mass to guarantee the handling performance, and favorably provide soft bounce stiffness to improve the ride comfort. The distribution of dynamic forces between the front and rear wheels is more reasonable, and the vibration decay rate of sprung mass is increased effectively. This research proposes a new suspension design method that can achieve the enhanced cooperative control of bounce and pitch motion modes to improve the ride comfort and handling performance of mining vehicles as an effective passive suspension system.