Question

how does car suspension related to simple harmonic motion?

Answer 1

A car suspension has springs, so that when the wheels experience a jolt up or down, it isn't immediately transmitted to the car body (and its occupants). Instead, the spring compresses, allowing the wheel to rise without the body rising, or the spring expands, allowing the wheel to fall without the body falling.

Additionally, once the jolting process (the bump or pothole) is gone, the spring naturally acts to push the wheel back into position -- the compressed spring expands, forcing the wheel back down, or the extended spring contracts, pulling the wheel back up.

Unfortunately, you can't stop there. Once the spring has been set into motion, simple harmonic motion, it will continue. The wheel will attempt to overshoot, expanding the spring (if it originally was compressed) or compressing it (if it was originally expanded), and an oscillatory vibration will ensue.

Cars generally have shock absorbers to put a stop to this. The shock absorber is just a piston in a cylinder full of something viscous, so that it presents a drag force to motion in either direction, like moving a stick in a put of glue. This rapidly damps out the oscillation of the wheel-spring assembly.

Answer 2

At resonance the amount of energy lost due to damping is equal to the rate of energy supply from the driver. The driver is the source of external energy that keeps the oscillations going - for example, the person pushing a kid on a swing. Increasing the damping will reduce the size (amplitude) of the oscillations at resonance, but the amount of damping has next to no effect at all on the resonant frequency.

Damping also has an effect on the 'sharpness' of a resonance; sharpness is a not-very scientific way of describing how sensitively the resonance is tuned, and is sometimes called the 'Q-factor' by engineers. If damping is very small, a system will only oscillate a little if driven even slightly above or below the 'right' frequency - but when the driver hits the resonant frequency 'bang-on', suddenly the oscillations can get very large. Conversely, if damping is large, the amplitude of oscillations at resonance will decrease, but if the driver shakes (excites) the system at the 'wrong' frequency, the system will still respond quite strongly. This means there will be less of a resonant effect, but that it will happen over a larger range of frequencies.

Answer 3

Hey u can understand perfectly on this link...... http://www.acoustics.salford.ac.uk/feschools/waves/shm4.htm

Answer 4

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