Stiffness Calculation and Dynamic Simulation of Air Spring

The paper presents a methodology to calculate the vertical stiffness of air spring. Investigation is focused on a convoluted air spring with one lobe. Based on the configuration of the membrane of the air spring and the geometry during its deflection, a stiffness expression dependant on the deflection is obtained. To have a good understanding of the performance of a single-degree-of-freedom system consisted of an air spring and a sprung mass, the paper provides an algorithm to simulate the motion of the system. The algorithm is a numerical step-by-step integration which combines explicit and implicit algorithms. A stiffness updating method based on the said stiffness expression is used in the dynamic simulation algorithm.