Shock absorber

An automobile shock absorber contains spring-loaded check valves and orifices to control the flow of oil through an internal piston (see below).

In general terms, shock absorbers help cushion vehicles on uneven roads and keep wheels in contact with the ground.

Shock absorbers are an important part of car suspension designed to increase comfort, stability and overall safety.

The most common type is a hydraulic shock absorber, which usually includes a piston, a cylinder, and an oil-filled chamber.

or vibration in the vehicle, the piston moves into the cylinder, forcing the hydraulic fluid through small holes, creating resistance and dissipating energy in the form of heat.

Shock construction requires a balance of features such as piston design, fluid viscosity, and overall size of the unit to ensure performance.

The design and manufacture of shock absorbers is constantly evolving due to the continuous improvement of vehicle dynamics and passenger comfort.

It does not seem to have gone into production right away, whereas mechanical dampers such as the Gabriel Snubber started being fitted in the late 1900s (also the similar Stromberg Anti-Shox).

[3] French engineers Gaston Dumond and Ernest Mathis patented two different hydraulic shock absorbers with rectilinear motion in 1906–1907, but those were not commercially successful.

[4] One of the earliest hydraulic dampers to go into production was the Telesco Shock Absorber, exhibited at the 1912 Olympia Motor Show and marketed by Polyrhoe Carburettors Ltd.[3] This contained a spring inside the telescopic unit like the pure spring type 'shock absorbers' mentioned above, but also oil and an internal valve so that the oil damped in the rebound direction.

The first production hydraulic dampers to act on the main leaf spring movement were probably those based on an original concept by Maurice Houdaille patented in 1908 and 1909.

There appears to have been little progress on commercialising the lever arm shock absorbers until after World War I, after which they came into widespread use, for example as standard equipment on the 1927 Ford Model A and manufactured by Houde Engineering Corporation of Buffalo, NY.

Variously known as a "gas cell two-tube" or similarly named design, this variation represented a significant advancement over the basic twin-tube form.

Twin-tube gas charged shock absorbers represent the vast majority of original modern vehicle suspension installations.

These grooves allow the piston to move relatively freely in the middle range of travel (i.e., the most common street or highway use, called by engineers the "comfort zone") and to move with significantly less freedom in response to shifts to more irregular surfaces when upward and downward movement of the piston starts to occur with greater intensity (i.e., on bumpy sections of roads— the stiffening gives the driver greater control of movement over the vehicle so its range on either side of the comfort zone is called the "control zone").

Not only does this result in a complete disappearance of the "comfort vs. control" tradeoff, it also reduced pitch during vehicle braking and roll during turns.

The principal design alternative to the twin-tube form has been the mono-tube shock absorber which was considered a revolutionary advancement when it appeared in the 1950s.

[8] Spool valve dampers are characterized by the use of hollow cylindrical sleeves with machined-in oil passages as opposed to traditional conventional flexible discs or shims.

[11] Primary among benefits cited in Multimatic’s 2010 patent filing is the elimination of performance ambiguity associated with flexible shims, resulting in mathematically predictable, repeatable, and robust pressure-flow characteristics.