Endurance Tests on a Colloidal Damper Destined to Vehicle Suspension

Endurance tests on a colloidal damper destined to vehicle suspension are performed. Such absorber represents an ecological application of nano-damping; it employs the hysteresis which occurs when water is forced to penetrate and then naturally exudes from a nanoporous silica gel matrix, modified to become liquid-repellent. Damping performances decrease at the increasing of the number of working cycles, partially since the silica gel grains that undergo gradual fatigue fracture are able to escape at the packing used to seal the test chamber, and partially due to the fatigue fracture alone, which is accompanied by an enhancement of the hydrophilic silanol groups on the silica gel surface and a pore size redistribution. In order to augment damper’s life, silica gel is introduced inside of a tank that is separated by a filter from the main cylinder, in which only water is supplied. One discusses the influence of filtration on the colloidal damper performances and the variation of damper’s life versus the ratio of filter pore’s diameter to the mean size of the silica gel particles.