Active Force Control for Semi-Active Suspension with Magnetorheological Damper

Abstract

The suspension system of an automobile is responsible for smoothing out the ride and maintaining control of the vehicle. However, traditional passive suspension system does not achieve satisfactory performance due to a lack of control over the damping force. Semi-active suspension (SAS) systems are now even more feasible because to their reduced power consumption, which is a result of the quick advancement of electronic sensors and actuator technologyOne of the greatest and most dependable semi-active control components available for suspension systems that can further enhance ride comfort is the magnetorheological (MR) damper, which produces a regulated damping force.This study focuses on developing a controller scheme named Fuzzy logic with Proportional-Integral-Derivative (Fuzzy-PID) and Fuzzy logic with Propor-tional-Integral-Derivative and Active Force Control (Fuzzy-PID-AFC) controllers to control the damping force of the MR damper to achieve better ride comfort by reducing vibration from the simulated road bump. A sinusoidal vibration source is applied to the quarter car test rig to investigate the improvement of ride comfort as well as to ascertain the new hybrid Fuzzy-PID-AFC controller robustness. The study found that a comparison of sprung mass acceleration signals from the passive suspension with Fuzzy-PID and Fuzzy-PID-AFC shows improvement to the sprung mass acceleration by 17.7 % and 32 %, respectively. As a result, the hybrid Fuzzy-PID-AFC controller outperforms the conventional Fuzzy-PID controller in the vehicle vibration control of the SAS system with MR damper. The control system may be further improved by implementing a hybridized iterative learning method to get a more accurate and dynamic estimation of mass for the Active Force Control controller.