Abstract
This paper presents a control method based the lateral interconnected air suspension system, in order to improve the road handling of vehicles. A seven-DOF (Degree of freedom) full-vehicle model has been developed, which considers the features of the interconnected air suspension system, for example, the modeling of the interconnected pipelines and valves by considering the throttling and hysteresis effects. On the basis of the well-developed model, a sliding mode controller has been designed, with a focus on constraining and minimizing the roll motion of the sprung mass caused by the road excitations or lateral acceleration of the vehicle. Moreover, reasonable road excitations have been generated for the simulation based on the coherence of right and left parts of the road. Afterwards, different simulations have been done by applying both bumpy and random road excitations with different levels of roughness and varying vehicle lateral accelerations. The simulation results indicate that the interconnected air suspension without control can improve the ride comfort, but worsen the road handling performance in many cases. However, by applying the proposed sliding mode controller, the road handling of the sprung mass can be improved by 20% to 85% compared with the interconnected or non-interconnected mode at a little cost of comfort.
Highlights
The vehicle suspension plays an important role in reducing the body vibration transmitted from the road excitations and ensuring handling stability of vehicles [1,2]
Under the applied road excitations, the sliding mode controller reduces the roll angle by 72% compared with the “ON” state and 41% peak value of roll angle response compared with the “OFF” state
This paper designed a controller for the lateral interconnection air suspension aiming at improving the handling performance
Summary
The vehicle suspension plays an important role in reducing the body vibration transmitted from the road excitations and ensuring handling stability of vehicles [1,2]. Cui presented a simple condition-based control method according to the characteristics of the interconnected air suspension It involves turning on or off the interconnection according to the vehicle speed, steering angle, and the roll angle of the sprung mass [44]. Ju proposed an imitated skyhook control strategy, which gets rid of the estimation of vehicle speed and steering angle It can adjust the performance weights between handling and comfort by changing its control parameters [45]. Different from other control strategies that aim to provide a balance between comfort and handling, the proposed control method focuses on improving the handling and safety of the laterally interconnected air suspension, and achieves a better roll motion than both the interconnected and non-interconnected suspensions under all scenarios. The performance of interconnected air suspensions and non-interconnected air suspensions are discussed
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
