^Title Shock Absorber Load Testing

Required was a solution that would measure the increase in load as the bike went uphill to allow the company to adapt the suspension to the specifications of the user.

There are three key elements that played an important role in the success of this project.

• Loads needed to be established with millisecond precision. Therefore, capturing the information at the highest rate possible was key in ensuring that no information was missed out.
• Due to the outdoor nature of the testing, the strain gauges in the pin needed to remain stable over a wide range of temperatures.
• The application required a bespoke design of the pin to fit the design of the mountain bike.

A load pin was attached to the suspension which was connected to the FSU device as shown in the image below. The FSU, in turn, was then connected to a PC held in the backpack of our cyclist. With this, we were able to see how the different damping settings affected the loading in the shock absorber. The fast measurement rate allowed detailed analysis.

We used the high sampling rates of the FSU to analyse the effect of changing the damper settings. We tested how the rebound speed of our bike’s damper affects its shock absorption features after a 250 mm drop. Initially, we set our bike’s oil damper to quick rebound for our first test. Here is what we observed:

Hitec Sensors design load cells, force sensors, torque and pressure transducers which are incorporated into advanced, often custom applications in aerospace, medical, automotive industrial, energy, electronics, and other industries to support high-quality manufacturing and testing as well as operational safety.

Micro-Measurements is dedicated to the development, manufacture, and marketing of products for high-precision strain and stress measurement.