Self-Powered Actively Controlled Lateral Suspensions of High-Speed Trains Using Energy-Regenerative Electromagnetic Damper and Model Predictive Control

Although traditional active suspension can offer superior riding comfort and maneuverability over its semiactive and passive counterparts, its reliance on an external power supply has hindered its widespread applications in vehicles. To overcome this deficiency, this paper proposes an innovative self-powered active suspension design for a high-speed train (HST), by leveraging the recently emerging H-bridge circuit-based electromagnetic damper (HB-EMD), allowing bidirectional power flow between the damper and controlled system. The capability of HB-EBD to achieve unique self-powered active skyhook control was previously proved in a simplified single degree-of-freedom (SDOF) structure under harmonic excitations; however, the feasibility of employing HB-EMD to realize active vibration control for more complex structural systems under stochastic excitations remains an unanswered question. One main challenge is designing a novel control algorithm that can simultaneously realize vibration control and self-powering objectives, which is unattainable by traditional active control algorithms. In this study, an ad hoc model predictive controller (MPC) is designed to guarantee the fulfillment of these dual objectives. To evaluate the performance of the proposed active suspension design, two separate HB-EMDs are implemented on the front and rear sides of the secondary lateral suspensions of an HST model subjected to stochastic track irregularities. At a speed of 200km/h, the proposed HB-EMDs with MPC could achieve a 55% reduction in the lateral acceleration of the car body in comparison with passive suspension, meanwhile maintaining energy harvesting performance with an average output power of 25.0W. In contrast, a traditional active linear quadratic Gaussian (LQG) controller consumes 72.7W power when performing comparable vibration reduction. This study, for the first time, validates the feasibility of designing a self-powered, actively controlled secondary lateral HST suspension system without relying on an external power source, which will potentially pave the way for a new active vibration control paradigm for other generic structures.