An Isolation System for Racks on Board Vehicles

Trucks operating as mobile operation centers are equipped with cabinet-racks containing equipment sensitive to accelerations that must be preserved from mechanical shocks and vibrations. Therefore, racks on-board vehicles are often isolated to reduce the acceleration and the relative displacement amplitude to avoid impacts with surrounding bodies. Racks inertial characteristics may change over time due to the replacement of the items; therefore, it is desirable to have an adjustable isolation system to guarantee the same isolation efficiency and the correct attitude of the isolated body. In this paper, it is considered an isolation system constituted by air springs whose characteristics can be adjusted through the air pressure; it also includes wire rope stabilizers, to reduce pitch and roll oscillations, and magneto-rheological dampers to compensate the air spring low damping and to provide the ability to control the damping level in real time. After the description of the isolation system, the results of the experimental characterization, conducted on each isolation component, are reported. These results were adopted to evaluate numerically the system isolation efficiency. Finally, the preliminary experimental tests conducted on a rack test rig are presented