Abstract
An air suspension system of semi-trailer trucks controlled by semi-active fuzzy logic control is proposed and researched to reduce the dynamic load coefficient (DLC) of the wheel axles. A dynamical model described by a nonlinear system with 7-DOF of the vehicle and a Simulink program developed in Matlab software are applied to simulate the DLC values under different operation conditions. The fuzzy control is then applied to control damping coefficients of the air suspension system. The obtained results show that semi-active air suspension of semi-trailer truck is overall superior to passive air suspension. The DLC values are also significantly decreased in all cases of the road surface roughness, over a range of vehicle velocity and the different loaded conditions. Particularly, under vehicle fully loaded condition, the DLC value of the tractor driver is greatly reduced by 27.4 % at speed of 27.5 m/s on the ISO level B road.
Highlights
The ride comfort and road friendliness are two important indexes to evaluate the working performance of the suspension system of the semi-trailer trucks
The results showed that the dynamic load coefficient (DLC) value was greatly decreased by using the air suspensions
The DLC value depends on several factors, such as road surface condition, type of suspension, vehicle velocity, load, mass, and stiffness distribution of the vehicle's structure
Summary
The ride comfort and road friendliness are two important indexes to evaluate the working performance of the suspension system of the semi-trailer trucks. To improve the ride comfort and road friendliness, the vehicle’s suspension system ought to be able to isolate the sprung mass from road-induced disturbances and reduce the dynamic load coefficient (DLC) of tire forces from vehicle axles within limit of a set working space under various operating conditions. In former times, passive suspensions were mostly used in the semi-trailer trucks They are widely studied and improved by using air suspensions, active and semi-active suspensions due to their capabilities of consuming less power, low cost, and providing better ride quality. Many researchers showed that the application of the active or semi-active suspension for vehicles could improve the ride quality and reduce dynamic tire forces [1,2,3]. The researches noted that the reduction of the dynamical force on wheel axles could significantly reduce road damage
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