Abstract
A damper is a hydraulic device designed to absorb or eliminate shock impulses which is acting on the sprung mass of car body. It converts the kinetic energy of the shock into another form of energy, typically heat. The main mechanism for providing damping is by shearing the hydraulic fluid as it flows through restrictions. Since the damping mechanism depends on the flow restrictions, these restrictions are very important in damper design. Damper engineers often try several combinations of valve shims, piston orifices and bleed orifices before finding the best combination for a particular setup on a car. Therefore, the ability to tune a damper properly without testing is of great interest in damper design. For this reason, many previous researches have been done on modeling and simulation of the damper. This paper explains a genetic algorithm method to find the optimal parameters for the design objective and the simulation results agree well with the targeted damping characteristics.