Study of the Two-Phase Flow Characteristics of a Damping Orifice in an Oleo-Pneumatic Shock Absorber

Abstract

The oleo-pneumatic shock absorber involves a complex two-phase flow in the working process. In this paper, a simple oleo-pneumatic shock absorber model was established, and the volume-of-fluid (VOF) two-phase flow model was adopted to accurately simulate the distribution of the two-phase flow field in the shock absorber through the commercial software FLUENT 2020 R2. The accuracy of the simulation model was verified by the method of engineering damping force estimation, and the error of the numerical simulation results compared with the engineering estimation results was 7–8%. By numerical simulation, the influence of different orifice lengths and diameters on the maximum pressure, temperature, velocity and oil damping force inside the shock absorber was studied. The results showed that with the increase of the orifice length, the maximum pressure, flow rate and oil damping force in the shock absorber decreased. The temperature decreased first and then increased, but the overall effect was small. However, according to the oil volume fraction contour, the gas–liquid distribution in the shock absorber with an orifice larger than 15 mm was more chaotic. Increasing the diameter of the orifice had a great impact on the shock absorber. The maximum pressure, flow rate and damping force of the oil inside the shock absorber were sharply reduced, and the temperature continued to rise. These research results can provide reference for the optimization design of oleo-pneumatic shock absorbers.

Keywords

• oleo-pneumatic shock absorber
• two-phase flow
• damping orifice
• oil damping force