Damping Technology

[Sanx]

Add a teraHertz radar system to measure the road surface before the front tyre arrives at the bumps,and you might be approaching perfection in suspension performance.

Now that is an interesting idea. Instead of setting up the suspension to cope with the bumps and undulations in a particular surface, you have suspension that sets itself up for the road surface it's on at that particular point...

[DEATH_INC.]

Death,

If you were running a fliud with which you could quickly vary the viscosity, why would you need shims?

If you wanted to keep the damper as simple as possible, you could run a piston with a number of holes, and use the electronics to vary the damping characteristics.
These could then be based on sensor inputs such as swingarm angle, swingarm speed, cycle speed, throttle position, engine revs.
Going a level deeper, one could build a fuzzy logic into the system, so that if it recognised a pattern of a particular movement, followed by another particular movement (Eg: turn 1 at Pukekohe), it could then pre-empt the second movement, and have the damping ready for the bump before it hits. Or another example would be exiting the hairpin on a superbike. Every time when a particular reading of throttle position and revs are met, it could theoretically damp to compensate.

Thought of this too, but I think there's still not enough technology out there for this to be viable, at least not yet.....maybe it would be much easier to just vary the damper orifice (s) electronically? Why not just go to full active suspension if your gonna run some complicated electronic setup?
I still believe theres a place for mechanical devices on motorcycles, sometimes they do just work better.....