Abstract
The present study aims at development of a magnetorheological elastomer (MRE) based semi-active seat suspension isolator and its adaptive control using neural network (NN) control scheme. Isotropic MRE samples with 25% volume fraction of iron particles have been fabricated and then characterized under shear mode using a rotary magneto-rheometer to obtain MRE’s viscoelastic properties (shear storage and loss moduli) under different levels of applied magnetic flux density. Results reveal a significant change in the storage and loss moduli with respect to the varied magnetic field. The viscoelastic properties of the MRE are then utilized to design an MRE-based seat suspension isolator in order to attenuate the transmitted vibration to the driver. For this purpose, the modeling of the seat incorporated with the MRE-based isolator is derived and subsequently, a novel NN control scheme is proposed for the semi-active control of the MRE-based isolator. The convergence and stability of the proposed control strategy have been mathematically verified using the Lyapunov method. Finally, the performance of the proposed control strategy is compared with those obtained using passive and widely used sky-hook controllers under different types of excitation including harmonic motion, road bump, and random profile. It is shown that the proposed NN controller considerably mitigates the vibration of the driver seat and outperforms the passive and skyhook controllers over the frequency range of interest.
Highlights
Long-term exposure to the low frequency and large amplitude vibrations from car seats can lead to severe adverse health effects on the drivers (Wilder et al, 1994)
The seat suspension systems incorporating a passive control scheme are mainly effective for a narrow high-frequency range, which has been defined at early stages of design (Deng and Gong, 2008)
It can be realized from Equation (14) that the proposed MREbased seat suspension isolator has complex non-linear dynamics, and the actuation force of the magnetorheological elastomer (MRE) can be adjusted by the ratio of A/h and magnitude of the magnetic flux density generated at the location of the MREs
Summary
Long-term exposure to the low frequency and large amplitude vibrations from car seats can lead to severe adverse health effects on the drivers (Wilder et al, 1994). Where fMRE is the generated actuation force induced by MREs in the presence of the applied field and is described as: FIGURE 5 | Storage and loss moduli in the presence of varied magnetic flux density with the fixed frequency of 2 Hz and shear strain amplitude of 15% and its corresponding curve fitting results It can be realized from Equation (14) that the proposed MREbased seat suspension isolator has complex non-linear dynamics, and the actuation force of the MRE can be adjusted by the ratio of A/h and magnitude of the magnetic flux density generated at the location of the MREs. It should be noted that by increasing A/h, the bandwidth of the generated actuation force will increase.
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