Variable damping shock absorbers have received extensive attention for their efficient vibration reduction performance, and air springs have also been widely used in high-end commercial vehicles due to their nonlinear stiffness characteristics. This paper presents a novel semi-active cab suspension integrated with an air spring and a variable damping electromagnetic damper (A-EMD). The electromagnetic damper (EMD) prototype was designed, manufactured and tested. Then, due to the interference of nonlinear stiffness characteristics of the air spring with the controller in the subsequent design, the Takagi–Sugeno fuzzy method was adopted to segmentally linearize its nonlinearity, based on which an H∞ state feedback semi-active controller was designed to control the EMD to generate variable damping force. Furthermore, a Luenberger state observer was designed to provide immeasurable state parameters for the controller. Numerical simulations were carried out to validate the effectiveness of the proposed approaches, and the results show that the proposed control strategy can significantly improve the ride comfort of the A-EMD system. The vibration dose value (VDV) acceleration under the bump road and the frequency-weighted acceleration root mean square (FWA-RMS) under the random road decreased by 36.05% and 19.77%, respectively, compared with the passive suspension system.
This paper presents a novel vehicle dynamic controller for coordinating the Electronic Stability Program (ESP) and active suspension system (ASS) to improve the directional performance and roll stability of the vehicle. The controller consists of two levels. The upper level is responsible for monitoring system status, determining control objectives, and distributing the active forces. Also, a priority-weighting mechanism is proposed for model predictive control to generate an adaptive multi-objective cost function. Then, the distribution of active forces is obtained by solving a centralized optimization problem. In the lower level, the dynamics of the suspension actuators are taken into consideration in the control of suspension forces for the ASS, and the desired braking forces are achieved through braking torque control for the ESP. The effectiveness of the proposed controller is verified through numerical simulation by using a nonlinear full vehicle model. The simulation results show that the proposed dynamic controller can significantly improve the yaw and roll performance of the vehicle.
This paper combines the Kalman filter observer with self-sensing technology and integrates it into the electromagnetic damper (EMD), estimating the displacement and velocity of the EMD based on the three-phase voltage generated by the permanent magnet synchronous motor (PMSM). The self-sensing performance of the EMD is verified through theoretical analysis and experimental results. A vehicle suspension vibration control system composed of one-quarter vehicle electromagnetic suspension (EMS), a acceleration damping driven control (ADDC) algorithm, and a vibration excitation platform is established to test the vibration control performance of the self-sensing EMS. The experimental results show that under random road excitation, compared to passive suspension, the self-sensing-based ADDC reduced the vehicle vertical acceleration of the vehicle suspension, with a 28.92% decrease in the root mean square (RMS) value of the vehicle vertical acceleration. This verifies the effectiveness of the self-sensing capability of the EMS system. Incorporating self-sensing technology into the EMS system improves the vibration reduction performance of the suspension.
25 November 2025 in International Journal of Dynamics and Control