A preliminary study into the application of active force control strategy to an automotive suspension system

Abstract

This paper describes a novel approach to control an automotive suspension system employing active f orce control (AFC) strategy. AFC has been demonstrated to be very robust and effec tive in controlling dynamical system subject to disturbances, uncertainties, parametric changes and operating conditions. In the study, AFC is explicitly implemented to provide a robust mechanism f or the control of the suspension system that is subjected to a number of operating and loading condit ions pertaining to road input disturbance and deliberat ely introduced external disturbances. The classical proportional and derivative (PD) controller is also incorporated into the control scheme that could furth er enhance the effec tiveness of the prop osed method. An iterative learning technique was embedded into the control loop to obtain the estimated mass required by the AFC strategy to effect the control action. A modelling and simulat ion study was carried out on a quart er car model system with the applied control scheme taken into acceunt, A comparative study betwe en the AFC and pure PD schemes was performed to demonstrate the differences in the performance.