Abstract
A Shock absorber is one of the most important components in vehicle suspension systems. In general, many repeated analyses are required for the design of a shock absorber to satisfy the suspension characteristics of a specific automobile, like fluid flow analysis and mechanical analysis. The purpose of this study is to develop a fast design tool for shock absorber designers. One of the efficient solutions for this can be an empirical design method considering phenomenological effects from the shock absorber design variables. In order to extract the shock absorber's experimental characteristics, we used Taguchi method. This method showed that which design variables have major effects for the shock absorber's damping characteristics. This empirical design method also showed the direction of the design changes to satisfy the designer's intension.