Design, Fabrication and Testing of a Regenerative Strut

The fuel prices are increasing every day and so are the pollution caused by vehicles using fossil fuels. Moreover, in a car with an internal combustion engine, we get on average 25% efficiency, the other 75% is wasted, mostly through friction and heat. One important loss is the dissipation of vibration energy by shock absorbers in the vehicle suspension under the excitation of road irregularity and vehicle acceleration or deceleration. In this paper we design, manufacture and test a regenerative coil-over strut that is compact, simple in design and more economical. Since our strut is a modification of an existing strut design, it would be much more feasible to implement. We tested our prototype strut using a TATA Indica car under city road conditions. The damping characteristics and output voltage of the strut were recorded and compared with a normal coil over strut. Based on the test data, it was found that the strut was able to recover about 8-10 watts of electricity at 20kmph.