SPRING FREQUENCY
SPRING FREQUENCY
(OP)
We have come across some suspension guys who bounce cars up & down for 1 min,shocks,sway-bars etc disconnected to get a spring frequencey figure. They say they are getting cycles per min of different rate springs. They are using this as a basis for setting up there suspensions.
Is there someone who can shed some light on this subject as to me the more i think about it the more it seems like BS.
Is there someone who can shed some light on this subject as to me the more i think about it the more it seems like BS.





RE: SPRING FREQUENCY
RE: SPRING FREQUENCY
what theyre testing is chassis natural frequency, its an important part in the whole vehicle dynamics area. Check in your vibrations courses w=(k/m)^(1/2), its a measure of the stiffness of the suspension.
The higher the number of cycles per minute or Hz the stiffer the system. The softer the system the more grip you can get, the higher the system the less grip (generally). As always theres comprimises, less grip the higher frequency the more body roll control, higher anti roll moment at that end of the car - front / rear.
Its just a measure of the stiffness of the system per unit mass of chassis.
Jakub
RE: SPRING FREQUENCY
The front wheels hit a bump/hole before the rears, the time delay obviously depending on wheelbase and road speed.
If the spring frequency at the rear is made suitably higher, the rear will catch up with the front and the vehicle tends to rise and fall on its springs, rather than pitch violently back and forth.
In a softly sprung luxury limo barge that is underdamped (for comfort), the overall rise and fall is much less disturbing to the occupants than a pitching motion.
That is what I have read about this, for what it is worth.
RE: SPRING FREQUENCY
Warpspeed correctly points out that usually the rear is of a higher frequency to avoid pitching issues. I beleive the figure is roughly 1 : 1.3 for an optimum setting.
Jakub
RE: SPRING FREQUENCY
I'm from holland, and i've done a project on ambulances. We wanted to improve the roadholding capacity of the car without too much loss of comfort.
We also did the spring frequency test, get the car in bounce ( we call it "cadans" i don't know if its the same in english). For the best comfort the Hz frequency is about 1,1 hz. A normal van is about 1,6 hz
So it isn't all bs...
RE: SPRING FREQUENCY
Anything lower feels floaty and unstable, anything higher is rather too firm for comfort. Bouncing the vehicle without the shocks, is a good way to find out what you have, because it takes everything into account and gives you a definite figure to work from at each end of the vehicle.
RE: SPRING FREQUENCY
Actually measuring the frequencies certainly has merit, particularly for vehicles whose springs are not too heavily damped by the shocks. Although the basic math for matching front and rear ride frequencies for a given vehicle to a target speed isn't all that difficult, it is altogether too easy to assume that all of the basic inputs are constants.
Norm
RE: SPRING FREQUENCY
If you really want to know what is going on even in a simple case like this then the experiment is vital, because you have springs in series (eg tire wall stiffness), and you have springs in parallel (parasitic springing from, for example, rubber bushes) to the road springs.
If you actually want to achieve the flat ride criterion, you need to select a cruising speed, and know the wheelbase of the car. This gives you the time delay front to back. Then build a pitch and bounce model of the car, and fiddle with the rear spring rate until you minimise the pitch after a step input to the two wheels with the right time delay. Obviously you can't do much with the initial ramp up, but the trick is to get the front and back synchronised for the next couple of cycles, which is why the back has to be stiffer than the front, so it can catch up.
Cheers
Greg Locock
RE: SPRING FREQUENCY
Thanks in advance.
Norm
RE: SPRING FREQUENCY
The tolerance is very broad, once you have the basics in place. The main reason for this is that the motion is heavily damped so you only have three cycles at most to worry about, and the first quarter of the first one is a bust, so that leaves you with 2.75 cycles, of rapidly decreasing amplitude.
1.3 seems to be a very common answer, by the way. Our solar cars have always been very softly sprung, and the ride has been excellent, just by using this approach.
If you want to check your results I have a Mathcad worksheet somewhere for this. I don't do the ride tuning of the car, that is done using the obvious instrument, so I don't have any advanced tools for examining this.
Cheers
Greg Locock
RE: SPRING FREQUENCY
I've found 1:1.3 a few times in literature, although I know of people who use 1:1.2 and others which are close but not 1:1.3. The k^2/ab term would be effecting what ratio it would be yes?
A quick question if I may, what kind of damping range would standard road cars have, Ive been guessing between 0.25 to 0.5 (damper damping only) for a simple quater model?
Jakub
RE: SPRING FREQUENCY
yes k^2/ab is important, as is the choice of cruising speed and wheelbase.
Cheers
Greg Locock
RE: SPRING FREQUENCY
Norm
RE: SPRING FREQUENCY
RE: SPRING FREQUENCY
Jakub
RE: SPRING FREQUENCY
Critical damping isn't hard to achieve, but it results in harsh ride and limits the ability of the wheels to follow the road, particularly when the road drops away from the car. That results in lousy traction on anything less than a very smooth flat road.
Dick
RE: SPRING FREQUENCY
Norm
RE: SPRING FREQUENCY
It was good to hear your thoughts on this.
I can understand it for road cars.
Maybe i'm to thick but i just can't see why there so concerned about this method for race cars with 10,000,000 variables & a stop watch to worry about. Especially when there cars show a need for better suspension.
Thanks again.
RE: SPRING FREQUENCY
Norm
RE: SPRING FREQUENCY
As for the critical damping questions. I typically work on very sporty production based vehicles and it is very common for me to chose a damping force very close to critical, especially in the very low piston speed areas to keep the steering very crisp. Typically the damping value drops off to .4~.45 in the mid to high speed area of the damping curve.
RE: SPRING FREQUENCY
Quote:
Most of the books on vehicle dynamics tell us that we should be vitally interested in the natural frequency of our springs. I have never figured out why?
I will admit that if the natural frequency of the front suspension were equal to that of the rear, the car could get into pogo stick mode, but with the natural harmonic frequency of the unsprung masses modified by the tyre hop frequency & the whole mess dampened by the shocks, it becomes a real mess to calculate, and the odds against the front and the rear ending up at the same harmonic frequency are negligible.
I (ignore) spring frequency. I also ignore the fact that, if the spring or shock is too stiff, then the tyre hop frequency will be undamped and the frequency of the spring & tyre can theoretically combine to cause trouble and the fact that the torsional frequency of the chassis itself must be well above the tyre hop frequency--it always is!
Thats all i have to say about the various frequencies associated with rates-we DON'T need to know about them!!
RE: SPRING FREQUENCY
Wheel (spring) rates by themselves do not tell you much, but bounce frequency ties everything together and gives a figure of merit that gives some idea of where you are, especially when starting out with an existing vehicle.
At least on a road car, keeping the rates within the 1Hz to 2Hz range, and with the rears slightly faster will give a pretty fair indication what the ride will be like, and if pitching is going to be a problem. There is a lot more to it, but you have to start somewhere I suppose.
RE: SPRING FREQUENCY
RE: SPRING FREQUENCY
Cheers
Greg Locock
RE: SPRING FREQUENCY
RE: SPRING FREQUENCY
Most of the books on vehicle dynamics tell us that we should be vitally interested in the natural frequency of our springs. I have never figured out why?
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Carroll Smith wrote this and the following sentences in a book published in 1978. I think it's fair to say that racecar engineering has progressed a little bit since then. While his statement was completely reasonable for his time, and probably the next decade and a half, there have been a couple of things that happened that made frequency anaylsis pretty stinkin' important.
First and formost, was data acquisition systems were made small and robust enough to live on a racecar. That was a huge advancement. Secondly, damper technology progressed to the point that we could adjust damping in very specific areas and have the ability to measure with very good accuracy where and how these changes were being applied.
On an aerodynamic racecar, you don't shoot for the 'flat ride' criteria that you do on a street car. If you run the rear at a higher frequency than the front, then as the aero pushes the car down at high speed, it will increase the rake in the car and shift your CoP forward. Not much good is ever said about high-speed oversteer. For this point alone, people tend to run the front quicker than the rear, even if they don't know they're doing it.
The second point is that in most racecars you are constantly looking rear traction at corner exit. Stiff rear springs usually give you all sorts of wheelspin problems. To use a great quote from Carroll, "A car is like a primate, it's got to squat to go."
_The Shock Absorber Handbook_ has a graph on page 61 that is replicated in many other books. No one explains it's massive implications very well, though. It's a graph of transmissibility vs. frequency ratio (impressed freq./natural freq.). We know that if we bounce the system at it's natural frequency the thing bounces out of control. What you should note, though, at higher frequencies the zero damping case is optimum! Who woulda thunk it? We spend all this time on dampers just to find out we'd be better off without them.
So, you might pose the question, what type of a scenario would be good with no damping? Well, the answer is that any road input that comes at the car quicker than Nat. Freq.*(sqrt(2)) will be felt less by the driver if the dampers have no damping. At highway speeds, that means pavement seams and pot holes, but it also means that in your sportscar with its 2Hz ride frequency, anything that takes less than about 1/3 of a second to happen will upset the car less with no damping and more with more damping.
Ever driven an old car with shocks that are shot? You can hit a rail-road track and its ride over the rails deceptively smooth. You get out on the highway and over a little undulation in the pavement wants to bounce into the next lane. This is exactly the case of zero (or very little) damping. In some ways, I like driving bad cars just to feel this.
With a data system on a modern racecar you can look at bumps that the driver complains about and determine what frequency they are coming in at and what direction to go with the dampers to make the car ride them better. You can also see if maybe it isn't a shock problem at all, but the overall spring rate is too quick or too slow for the road input. Adjust the rates accordingly and the problems will sometimes just disappear.
Carroll was a very 'from the hip' sort of guy. He had a huge wealth of experience and would know what to do with the car by using that experience. He wasn't a mathmatics or computer wizz by any stretch. He would flat out tell you that he didn't know a hell of a lot about shocks. He only had to deal with them in his last couple years of race engineering and that meant pretty much delegating the job to other people. I can promise you, though, if I could have sat down and shown him that by knowing the spring frequency and damping ratio the data system will tell me which way to do on the shock clickers, he would have been all over it.
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SuspTestEng, I bet you can pull out a bunch of the low speed damping (where you have it near critical drop down to 0.6 or so) without losing the crispness in the steering, give the car a better overall ride, and better overall grip. I used this exact same reasoning to keep low-speed damping in a racecar. When I finally took it out, we went way faster and never lost any response as long as the front springs were anything above marshmallow level. Piston bleed is your friend.
RE: SPRING FREQUENCY
We do the same with 'spring aids' and other similar devices.
Cheers
Greg Locock
RE: SPRING FREQUENCY
RE: SPRING FREQUENCY
Then it goes on using the 384 front rate and the 225 rear rate to solve for sta-bar rate(s).
Understand that this example was specifically for a race car; consequently the flat ride considerations that have been discussed earlier in this thread were ignored.
Norm
RE: SPRING FREQUENCY
Sorry, this involves my off topic question of finding the ride rate for an axle with non-symmetric left-right ride rates.
RE: SPRING FREQUENCY
RE: SPRING FREQUENCY
But it seems to me that the general case is where you have (left vs right) unequal wheel rates and/or unequal sprung mass magnitudes, where you will have unequal left vs right ride frequencies. That in turn suggests coupling between ride and roll motions.
Norm
RE: SPRING FREQUENCY
"Most of the books on vehicle dynamics tell us that we should be vitally interested in the natural frequency of our springs. I have never figured out why?"
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When racecar or sportscar builders ask me how stiff their springs should be*, I can't answer, "20N/mm for a nice ride" or "500N/mm at the front of your heavy, high downforce car and 600 at the back" or "1000lb/in front of V8 supercar and 300 at the back". I can't because I don't know leverage ratios or the front or rear weights of the car.
On the other hand, I can say "2Hz for any non-downforce racecar" or "1Hz for any limo" or "3.5Hz for any F1 car". It gives you a universal starting point. Of course you add detail like, "make the rear freq 10 - 30% higher for a low damped road car" or "F/R freqs can be the same for a well damped car" or "make it 50% higher because you're using swing axles".
If someone says they have a car with 600lb/in front springs, then no-one has any idea how comfortable it is, how much suspension movement it needs or how responsive it might be. But if they said the front ride frequency was 3Hz........
Rick Dathan
*OK, so I admit it has only happened a couple of times!
RE: SPRING FREQUENCY