Car absorbers provide a comfortable ride and improve ride handling by delivering road wheel contact. The typical car absorber problems are oil leakage and piston rod wear-out due to the lateral friction between the shell case and piston rod. The piston rod can bend and rupture when exposed to higher vibration exerting high impact force. This study focuses on optimizing car absorber piston rod design parameters via finite element analysis. The response surface methodology (RSM) was utilized to create the design of the numerical experiment. The piston rod parameters (i.e., length of the piston rod, the piston rod diameter #1, and the piston rod diameter #2) were optimized to reduce the stress and displacement of the piston rod. The optimization results revealed that the optimum parameters were 254 mm in piston length, 24.79 mm in diameter #1, and 15 mm in diameter #2. With the optimized piston rod parameters, the stress and displacement of the piston were 1.65048E+007 and 0.007569 mm, respectively. The most significant factors that influence the responses were also studied. The suggested optimized factors and responses were validated in the finite element simulation.
