A Comparative Study of Semi-Active Quarter Car Suspension Control Strategies for Magnetorheological Damper

Abstract

This paper addresses the problem of controlling quarter-vehicle semi-active suspension system. Presently, the suspension system involves a magnetorheological (MR) damper featuring hysteretic behavior captured through the Bouc-Wen model. The control objective is to regulate well the chassis vertical position despite the road irregularities. In addition to these irregularities, the difficulty of the control problem lies in the nonlinearity of the system model and the inaccessibility to measurements of the hysteresis internal state variable. The observer provide the online estimates of the hysteresis internal state. The later is performed using Lyapunov control design. Three controllers are developed, such as: the backstepping method, the Skyhook control and the LQR technique. Then each control policy is applied to the model equipped with a MR damper. The performances of each control algorithm are compared with the passive suspension in the time domains through the numerical simulation. The results show that the performance of a MR suspension system is highly dependent on the choice of algorithm employed, and the backstepping strategy exhibits an excellent performance.