Article: The Curious Genius Of Amar Bose (cool automotive content)

[Don Plumley]

After hearing of Dr. Bose's passing, I realized I really didn't know much about the man. This article talks about his days as an MIT professor, his unrelenting curiosity that let him spend years and countless $ on R&D, and how he was trying to tackle improving automotive suspension.

An excerpt:

...what may be his most audacious innovation yet, the Bose Suspension System. Unveiled this summer after 24 years of R&D, the Bose suspension is a mega-breakthrough that replaces automotive shock absorbers with ultrafast linear electric motors. The system, which Bose expects to bring to market within four years, isolates the passenger compartment from bumps and dips and, at the same time, eliminates pitching and rolling during braking and turning.

So how did Bose Corp. come to produce such a thing? Simple: The founder got curious. Bose had been tinkering with cars since the 1950s. "I wondered," he says, "what a car suspension could do without hardware constraints, if you could have any force you wanted, at any time, between the body and the wheel."

In 1980 he decided to find out. Automakers had spent half a century optimizing fluid-based suspension hardware, but Bose came at it from a completely different direction, disregarding hardware assumptions and limitations and focusing first on figuring out what kind of performance was theoretically possible. The research program began with five years of mathematical analysis, which revealed a tremendous performance gap, one that could not be closed by making adjustments to existing shock-absorber hardware.

"A shock absorber can only absorb energy," says Tom Froeschle, Bose Corp.'s vice president of engineering. "Plus, the inherent inertia of fluids makes any pneumatic or hydraulic system incapable of reacting fast enough to give us the performance we were looking for."
In 1985 the team began focusing on an electromagnetic solution. Such an approach would be possible only with high-efficiency, high-power linear motors and amplifiers. It would require extremely complex control algorithms to stabilize the motors and superquick microcomputers to run the system.

None of which existed.

It's so humbling to me to read about people with this depth of passion. Serious gut check.

[Zeke]

Seems like Bose was working on active suspension about when Porsche was.