A Study on the Optimal Design of Automotive Gas Spring

The gas spring is a hydropneumatic adjusting element, consisting of a pressure tube, a piston rod, a piston and a connection fitting. The gas spring is filled with compressed nitrogen within the cylinder. The filling pressure acts on both sides of the piston and because of area difference it produces an extension force. Therefore, a gas spring is similar in function compare to mechanical coil spring. Conversely, optimization is a process of finding the best set of parameters to reach a goal while not violating certain constraints. The AMESim software provides NLPQL (Nonlinear Programming by Quadratic Lagrangian) and GA (genetic algorithm) for optimization. The NLPQL method builds a quadratic approximation to the Lagrange function and linear approximations to all output constraints at each iteration, starting with the identity matrix for the Hessian of the Lagrangian, and gradually updating it using the BFGS method. On each iteration, a quadratic programming problem is solved to find an improved design until the final convergence to the optimum design. In this study, we conducted optimization design of the gas spring reaction force with NLPQL.

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