A Single-Sensor Control Strategy for Semi-Active Suspensions

Abstract

The topic of this brief is the design and analysis of a control strategy for semi-active suspensions in road vehicles. Currently used closed-loop control strategies (like the Sky-Hook damping) require two sensors for each suspension. Typically, two accelerometers or an accelerometer combined with a stroke sensor are used. In this brief, a simple but innovative algorithm is proposed that is capable of providing quasi-optimal performance using a single accelerometer. The starting point of this work is the Mix-SH-ADD control algorithm, which has been recently developed and proposed. Starting from that idea, the single-sensor algorithm is derived. This algorithm pays a small price in terms of performance with respect to the mix SH-ADD algorithm, while guaranteeing cost reduction and augmented reliability.

Control of magnetorheological dampers for vibration reduction in a washing machine

“…As is well known (see e.g. [34][35][36]) this high controllability ratio is a very important and appealing feature for semi-active control design purposes. The current driver used for this research work is a standard output analog module of the National Instruments cRio system.…”

“…[29,[34][35][36]) that, beyond the main system resonance, the best filtering performance can be achieved by a sinusoidal modulation of the damping force, at the same frequency of the disturbance; moreover, the best results are typically achieved by using the whole available modulation range. The candidate best control signal hence has the following expression:…”

Performance analysis of semi-active suspensions with control of variable damping and stiffness

“…(k min , k max ) is the controllability range of the spring. The following nominal parameters are used: c nom = 1500 Ns/m, k nom = 20, 000 N/m [19,44,62]. Note that the parameters are those of a standard European sedan (very similar to the one used in [19]).…”

“…The research activity in this field is carried out along two mainstreams: the development of new technologies for semi-active actuation systems [6,[52][53][54], and the development of new control algorithms and control strategies for such systems [19,[43][44][45][55][56][57][58]. This paper belongs to both of these research areas: the application of controllable shock absorbers in the suspension system architecture capable of modulating both the damping and the equivalent stiffness coefficients is presented; based on this kind of system, a new control algorithm is also developed and discussed.…”

“…The design of an optimal comfort-oriented damping strategy has been an open issue for the last decades. Recent works presented damping rules for classical semi-active suspensions that can be considered optimal for comfort purposes [14,44,61].…”