Effect of time-delay feedback control on vehicle seat vibration reduction and suspension performance

To reduce seat vibration caused by uneven road surfaces, the time-delay feedback control into the seat suspension system was introduced and an active seat suspension control method based on time-delay feedback was proposed in this paper. A three-degree-of-freedom (3-DOF) suspension model with time-delay feedback control was established. The time-delay independent stability region and critical stability curve of the system were derived using the method of characteristic root and stability switching. The effect of feedback control parameters on system vibration was investigated in the stability region. The seat acceleration (SA), body acceleration (BA), suspension dynamic deflection (SDD), and tire dynamic displacement (TDD) were used as multi-objective optimization functions and the optimal values of feedback control parameters were obtained based on the particle swarm algorithm (PSO) with above optimization functions. The numerical simulation was conducted to validate the proposed model. The simulated results show that the time-delay feedback control can significantly suppress the vibration response of the seat and effectively improve the suspension performance under different road excitation compared with the passive suspension. It can be seen that the active seat suspension with time-delay control significantly improve ride comfort and handling stability of the vehicle, which can be used as a reference for the active control technology of vehicle suspension.