Evaluating car's ride comfort and controlling vibration of suspension system based on adaptive PID control

Abstract

The vertical vibration of the vehicles not only affects the durability of parts of the vehicle and road surface but it also affects the driver’s ride comfort and health. The aim of this study is to evaluate the effect of the vertical vibration on the driver’s ride comfort and health under the vehicle different operating conditions. The adaptive PID control is then applied to improve the vehicle's ride comfort. To achieve this goal, a 2D vibration model for the cars with 5 DOF is established to simulate. The different operating conditions of the speed, road surface, load, and working time of the vehicles are respectively evaluated based on the vertical weighted r.m.s. acceleration responses of the driver’s seat and the international standard ISO 2631. The results show that the road surface condition has the greatest influence on the driver’s comfort and health. With the vehicle's suspension system controlled by the adaptive PID controller, the ride comfort of the vehicle is significantly improved under the various road surfaces. Particularly, at ISO level B, the vertical driver's seat root-mean-square acceleration value is greatly reduced by 24.99 % while the pitching vehicle body root-mean-square acceleration value is decreased by 25.10 % in comparison with the passive suspension system.