Identification and Modeling of a Mountain Bike Front Suspension Subsystem Equipped with a Telescopic Fork and Tire Damping

A key component in the mountain bike industry is the telescopic front suspension, which offers the advantage of improved performance when traversing obstacles, rough terrain, and high impact landings. Despite the popularity of telescopic forks in the market and their incorporation into vehicle level simulation, the details and modelling assumptions around this subsystem have received limited attention in the literature... This paper presents a system identification and modeling approach that promises a deeper understanding of the dynamic behavior of mountain bikes with telescopic front suspensions. The mountain bike front suspension subsystem is modelled initially using the classic quarter car model with the suspension and tire both included as second-order systems, each with spring and damper elements in a Kelvin-Voigt arrangement stacked in series. The paper then incrementally increases the complexity of the quarter car model by performing a parameterization study of the fork and tire. The model results are compared to data from an impact sled test of a telescopic mountain bike front suspension subsystem. The correlation between the quarter car model response and the test data varies with the complexity and inclusion of parameters suggesting that the inclusion of key parameters in the model is an important aspect of modeling the mountain bike front suspension system.