Abstract
It is a general viewpoint that the hysteresis behavior of leaf springs is harmful to vehicle ride and comfort. In this paper, the vehicle ride and comfort of a quarter model is analyzed with and without consideration of the hysteresis behavior of leaf springs so that the influence of this behavior on the ride and comfort can be revealed. In the quarter vehicle model, the tire mass, tire damper coefficients, and tire vertical rigidity are included, and some real space-history road data are used as the input of the model. Simulation results are given under different degree of hysteresis behavior of leaf springs.