• Korean Journal of Computational Design and Engineering
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• v.7 no.1
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• pp.1-8
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• 2002

A Hotchkiss spring has been widely utilized for commercial vehicle. Usually, the Hotchkiss spring has non-linear characteristics, i.e. it has a piecewise spring stiffness as well as hysterisis phenomenon. Therefore, the modeling of the Hotchkiss spring requires many considerations to fulfill satisfactory vehicle kinematic and dynamic relationships. Also, the spring has difficulties in modeling for presenting contact mechanism. In this paper, the modeling technique for the Hotchkiss spring has been descried. The modeling covers non-linear characteristics as well as contact problems for multi-body dynamic simulation. The force-displacement results are compared with experimental and FEM ones. Also, the comparison between three link type leaf spring model and proposed one has been considered in this paper.