Abstract
A rubber bush used in an automotive suspension system is an important element for the ride comfort and the driving stability. The relation between the applied force to the rubber bush and its deformation is non-linear and shows a feature of viscoelasticity. In a real-time analysis of a vehicle model with the rubber bush, it becomes a subject of discussion how to express the characteristic of the rubber bush with a simple model. This paper addresses the modeling of the rubber bush using the generalized Maxwell model based on measurement results of the viscoelastic test piece. For this purpose, we developed a testing machine that consists of a small-sized 6-DOF motion platform. The dynamic analysis with the generalized Maxwell models based on the measurement results was conducted for verifying effectiveness of this model.
