A negative Poisson's ratio suspension jounce bumper

• NPR jounce bumper had smooth transition area of load-displacement curve which is beneficial to vehicle NVH performance.
• 49.3% of impact energy was absorbed by NPR jounce bumper with maximum displacement of 40 mm atloading speed of 50 mm/min.
• Working stroke of 3D printing prototypes is less than 20 mm because of the low elongation at break of printable material.

Jounce bumpers in automotive suspension can absorb impact energy and improve Noise, Vibration and Harshness (NVH) performance of entire vehicle. In this paper, a negative Poisson's ratio (NPR) structure was introduced and applied on the jounce bumper. The NPR jounce bumper can be primarily described by few parameters and is convenient for design, analysis and optimization. Three NPR jounce bumper prototypes were manufactured and tested. The test results of prototype 1 indicated that the NPR jounce bumpers had excellent viscoelasticity characteristic to absorb impact energy owing to its high damping. Compared with traditional jounce bumper, the NPR jounce bumper can achieve similar mechanical behavior but with a smoother load-displacement curve, which is beneficial to the NVH performance. Moreover, numerical calculation was conducted. Its results were fairly reliable for the prediction of mechanical behavior of NPR jounce bumper. The numerical results implied the stress concentration areas and the displacement of failure. The deformation shapes of NPR jounce bumper were also discussed. Finally, prototypes 2 and 3 manufactured from 3D printing technology were tested to explore the possibility of the application of 3D printing technology on NPR structures.

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