Vibration Control of a Suspension System via a Magnetorheological Fluid Damper

Abstract

Semi-active control systems are becoming more popular because they offer both the reliability of passive systems and the versatility of active control without imposing heavy power demands. It has been found that magneto-rheological (MR) fluids can be designed to be very effective vibration control actuators. The MR fluid damper is a semi-active control device that uses MR fluids to produce a controllable damping force. The objective of this paper is to study a single-degree-of-freedom suspension system with an MR fluid damper for the purpose of vibration control. A mathematical model for the MR fluid damper is adopted. The model is compared with experimental results for a prototype damper through finding suitable model parameters. In this study, a sliding mode controller is developed by considering loading uncertainty to result in a robust control system. Two kinds of excitations are inputted in order to investigate the performance of the suspension system. The vibration responses are evaluated in both time and frequency domains. Compared to the passive system, the acceleration of the sprung mass is significantly reduced for the system with a controlled MR damper. Under random excitation, the ability of the MR fluid damper to reduce both peak response and root-mean-square response is also shown.

Chaotic vibration of a quarter-car model excited by the road surface profile

“…Trueba et al [30] performed systematic studies for basic nonlinear oscillators including those with combined damping. Here the motivation in using a complicated damping term is different, and arises from the use of magnetorheological dampers in vehicle suspensions [13,14,15]. The signs of the c i coefficients (Eqs.…”

“…Systems with Duffing characteristics having non-symmetric potentials and a linear repulsive force term are a wide class of mechanical systems and have been the subject of previous investigations in the context of the appearance of chaotic solutions [23,24,25,28]. This paper uses a similar approach for a quarter car model with a magnetorheological damper [13,14,15].…”

“…Consequently old mechanical quarter car models [8,9] have been re-examined in the context of active damper applications. Dampers based on magnetorheological fluid with typical hysteretic characteristics have significant promise for effective vibration damping in many applications [13,14,15]. New ideas in vehicle vibration damping, such as 'Sky hook' control [16] or H ∞ control [15,17] have already been implemented and tested in several car and motorcycle applications.…”

Controlling the magnetorheological suspension of a vehicle seat including the biomechanics of the driver

“…Semi-active vibration systems via magnetorheological fluid damper have been discussed by several researchers in recent years [27][28][29][37][38][39]. MR fluids are a class of materials whose rheological properties are rapidly varied by applying a magnetic field.…”

“…For purposes of suspension parameters identification the MR damper RD-1005-1 of Lord Corporation has been used in this study (the MR damper RD-1005-1 has been described in literature, see Lai and Liao [38]). Total model parameters of suspension and seat (without the parameters describing stiffness and damping of the foam of the seat cushion and seat back) are shown in Table 6.…”