I've been doing some more figgerin'. Ray Munday has posted a damping comparison for several 12mm and 10mm pistons in his thread in the Aussie section. The graph shows the damping force for the different pistons with varying viscosities at two different piston speeds (50mm/s and 2000 mm/s). Obviously that's just a short step away from calulating the damping coefficient (N/mm/s, or N-s/mm), and for the same piston and oil, the results are much different between the two speeds. This appears to indicate that the damping coefficient of the shock is not linear with speed. Hopefully, Scott is able to generate some data at higher speeds to confirm or deny this. I believe the graph Ray has posted is based on calculations rather than actual dyno data, but I guess I'm not sure (maybe he can chime in on that).

Plus, when looking at Scott's F-V graphs, there appears to be a bit of non-linearity (exponential???) displayed on the rebound (downstroke) of the shock, particularly in the Viscosity Effects graph. Perhaps that would also be showing up on the upstroke (compression) side as well if it weren't for the "spring affect" from the air in the oil. The lines are much cleaner on the down stroke, and you can see some non-linearity on that side.

The flip side is that this non-linearity doesn't show up as much in other comparison data Scott has presented (Emulsion vs Bladder, etc.). In fact, the Bladder and Foam graph appears to be very linear. So maybe there isn't anything to my interpretation of the graphs. I'm curious, though, to see how this shakes out if Scott is able to generate some higher piston speed data. The data provided by Ray appears to show non-linearity of damping coefficient with speed, and based on simple flow through orifice type calculations and whatnot, there should be some sort of exponential component to the damping with increasing to piston speed. But maybe at this scale the typical orifice flow models are no good??? I'd believe Scotts dyno data over a calculation, personally. It's hard to argue with good data, but easy to overlook something when creating a calculation.

Thoughts?