• Proceedings of the Korean Society for Noise and Vibration Engineering Conference
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• 1998.04a
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• pp.34-39
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• 1998

In order to compute the forces which are transmitted through rubber bushings with a commercial multibody dynamic analysis (MBDA) program, a rubber bushing model is needed. The rubber bushing model of MBDA programs such as DADS or ADAMS is the Voigt model which is simply a parallel spring-viscous damper system, meaning that the damping force of the Voigt model is proportional to the frequency. However, experiments do not necessarily support this proportionality. Alternatively, the viscoelastic characteristics of rubber bushings can be better represented by the complex stiffness. The purpose of this paper is to develop a viscoelastic rubber bushing model for the MBDA programs. Firstly, a methodology is proposed to calculate the complex stiffness of rubber bushings considering static and dynamic load conditions. Secondly, a viscoelastic rubber bushing model developed which uses standard elements provided by DADS. The proposed methods are applied to the rubber bushings of the lower control arms of a rear suspension of a 1994 Ford Taurus model. Then, the forces computed for the rubber bushing model are analyzed and compared with the Voigt model in time and frequency domains.