Simulation and experimental analysis of an active vehicle suspension system

Abstract

This project was carried out to study the performance of a two degree-of-freedom (DOF) active vehicle suspension system with active force control (AFC) as the main proposed control technique. The overall control system essentially comprises two feedback control loops. First is intermediate AFC control loop for the compensation of the disturbances and second is the outermost Proportional-Integral-Derivative (PID) control loop for the computation of the optimum commanded force. Iterative learning method (ILM) and crude approximation (CA) were used as methods to approximate the estimated mass in the AFC loop. Both simulation and experimental studies were applied in this project. A quarter car model consists of sprung and unsprung masses is considered in developing of the computer simulation model in Simulink and also in the experimental set-up. Both simulation and experimental work were carried out and the results between the two of them are compared. The results of the simulation study show that active suspension system using AFC with CA and ILM gives better performance compared to PID controller and passive suspension system. Experimental results obtained in the study further verified the potential and superiority of the performance of the active suspension system with AFC strategy compared to the PID control.