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Abstract — Automotive suspension system design is very active suspension, which means that some additional force
important part of the passengers comfort and safety. In this article can act on system.
automotive active suspension with electric linear motor as an With respect to these contradictory requirements the best
actuator is designed. Due to many reasons H-infinity control is used.
This paper is focused on comparison of different controller designed
results can be achieved using active suspension systems
for quart, half or full-car controller (and always used for ―full‖ car). generating variable mechanical force acting in the system
Each controller configuration is simulated and then verified on the using a linear electrical motor as the actuator. Compared to
hydraulic quarter car test bed. traditional drives using rotational electro-motors and lead
screw or toothed belts, the direct drive linear motor exhibits
Keywords — robust control, active vehicle suspension, linear the property of contact-less transfer of electrical power
motors, energy control. according to the laws of magnetic induction. The
electromagnetic force is applied directly without the
I. INTRODUCTION
intervention of a mechanical transmission. Low friction and
(Fig. 1). Bottom spring represents a character of the car tire. Of course, there is possibility to prepare model for the front
In semi-active suspension a controllable damper is used and and rear part also. In fact we can use the same equations and
therefore the controller has possibility to change the damping rotate the model for 90°.
quotient. Therefore the damping characteristics of the system
can be changed dynamically during driving.
Interesting study on symbolic analysis of mechanical
models is in [9].
F1 L1 F2 L2 F3 L1 F4 L2 JP 0
F1 D1 F2 D2 F3 D1 F4 D2 J PR 0
F1 F2 F3 F4 mb vT 0
zb1 vT L1 D1
zb 2 vT L2 D2
zb 3 vT L3 D3
zb 4 vT L4 D4 (3)
mb zb1 L1 mb zb 2 L2 J P 0
D. Simulation model
mb zb1 mb zb 2 mb vT 0
The full-car active suspension model has been developed
zb1 vT L1 for complex analysis of suspension behavior. This model is
zb 2 vT L2 (2) considered as a vehicle model with four wheels. Moreover
influence of braking and cornering is included. Finally
IV. CONTROLLERS
There is a basic question which model should be used for
controller design? According to mathematical models
described in the previous section, three different controllers
have been designed. Starting with easiest quarter car and
Fig. 6. Linear electric motor TBX3810. ending with full car model controller.
Linear motor translator movements take place with high What can be expected? If the design model is not full then
velocities (up to approximately 200m/min), large obviously the results cannot be optimized for real full car. But
accelerations (up to g multiples), and forces (up to kN). As is it really an issue? Are the results for quarter car model so
mentioned above, the electromagnetic force can be applied bad in comparison with full model? Next paragraphs describe
directly to the payload without the intervention of such design and then the controllers are compared.
a mechanical transmission, what results in high rigidity of the A. H-infinity controller
whole system, its higher reliability and longer lifetime. In An H-infinity controller is computed as ||T y1u1||∞ norm
practice, the most often used type is the synchronous three- minimization (see Fig. 9). So it is possible to shape a closed
phase linear motor. In this research the ThrustTube TBX3810 loop characteristic in open branch to improve performance of
motor is used (see [12]). the whole system. The basic schematic diagram of a plant
The force/velocity profile is in Fig. 7. This profile assumes augmentation is shown in the Fig. 8.
the continuous working voltage is available across the motor System has two inputs – road disturbance and acting signal
(there are no amplifier limitations). for linear motor. The first output is used to modify
It is necessary to answer one important question – if it is performance and robustness behavior of resulted closed loop.
more advantageous to include the model of the linear electric Second output is the feedback signal for controller.
motor in the model for active suspension synthesis or if it The first output can be weighted by either by constant or by
should be used only for simulations. frequency function to achieve the desired closed loop
Comparing advantages and disadvantages of the model characteristic. How the function or constant was developed is
inclusion, it can be said that the closed-loop provides more described the following sections (they are different for each
information so that better control results can be achieved. controller configuration).
Unfortunately, there are also some significant disadvantages
in such a solution (complexity, nonlinearity etc.).
Road behavior
0.025
0.02
0.015
displacement [m]
0.01
0.005
-0.005
0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7 0.8 0.9 1 1.1
time [s]
VII. RESULTS
The stability has not been affected by the different
controllers, because the design was driven to achieve stability
level and improve comfort. So only comfort is evaluated
bellow. Fig. 17. Angular velocity on a slow-down retarder.
The main objective of the paper was to compare different
H-infinity controller. If we are thinking about each condition Finally is the time to compare each method of control used
in controllers then the results are not surprising, but some for automotive active suspension. Both described signal was
aspects are at least important from the practical aspects. Let’s tested during simulations (and for quarter car during
take a look at it. experiment). The results are summarized in the Table 1. The
For closed-loop illustration there is body acceleration (in the RMS for comfort (mentioned above) is compared for each
Fig. 16) response on a driving through slow-down retarder controller, whereas ―passive‖ controller means without
described in previous section for quarter car model control.
configuration (full controller = green, half controller=red,
passive=blue).
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
This research has been supported by the MSMT project No.
1M6840770002 ‖Josef Bozek’s Research Center of
Combustion Engines and Automobiles II‖