FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE March 28, 2001

For further information contact:

Charles Van Breemen

INVENTIONEERING™

805 Park Street

Clearwater, FL 33756

727 446-8400
fax 727 446-8900

chuck @ inventioneering.org

SELF-DAMPED AIR SPRING ELIMINATES NEED FOR SHOCK ABSORBER

Up till now suspension engineers have been forced to use a shock absorber in their suspensions tocontrol harmonic vibration. However, use of a shock absorber in a suspension or vibrationisolation system always reduces the effectiveness of the isolation. This is because the shockabsorber transmits some of the shock directly to the isolated part. It can be said that the shockabsorber is doing the wrong thing, at least half the time. Suspension engineers in the past havetried to get around this by designing expensive and complicated computer controlled systems.

Now suspension designers have a simpler option--the self-damped air spring. The self-damped airspring eliminates the need for an additional damping device by creating a force that is 180degrees out of phase with the force in function. Isolation is improved because the initial forcefrom the input is absorbed totally by the spring with no damping. Damping occurs naturally andonly when needed. Damping forces up to 30% of critical have been measured.

The self-damped air spring consists of a variable volume air chamber (such as conventional airspring) and an additional fixed volume air chamber usually forming one end of the air spring. Thevariable volume chamber and the fixed volume chamber are separated by an orifice. Design isoptimized by a new computer program which calculates optimum size of all of the importantparameters. The computer program has been validated by tests that show close comparison between computer results and actual tests.

The self-damped air spring is protected by patent No. 4,871,189 and is available for license. Contact the inventor, Charles Van Breemen, at INVENTIONEERING, 1807 Douglas Ave.,Clearwater, FL 33755. Tel: 727 446-8400/ Fax 727 446-8900 Email:chuck@inventioneering.org.

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