Design and control of a full-scale quarter car test rig for semi-active suspension system

Abstract EN

Passive hydraulic dampers are commonly used in the automotive suspension system.

Nevertheless, they are suffering from a significant drawback owing to the changing of its characteristics at high-frequency; as a result, decreasing the ride quality due to the increase of the transmitted force, especially at high frequency excitations.

The present work developed a semi-active suspension system to solve this problem with its effect.

A Sky-hook control strategy is used to suppress the positional oscillation of the sprung mass in the presence of road irregularities via the use of the electrohydraulic (EH) damper, as an objective.

In order to apply the control strategy used herein, a full-scale quarter-car test platform has been designed and constructed to offer increased testing flexibility at a reasonable cost not found commercially.

MATLAB Simulink is applied for modeling the semi-active suspension system.

The control strategy using a Sky-hook control was used to enhance the comfort due to the simplicity of this method that can easily be implemented in a real-time embedded application.

The control strategy is evaluated for its performance under the road bump excitation.

The experimental results were compared with the simulated ones for both passive and semi-active suspension systems, the comparison includes time response analysis of body vertical displacement, and vertical displacement of quarter car structure.