Implementation of an Electromagnetic Regenerative Tuned Mass Damper in a Vehicle Suspension System

High cost and significant power absorption do not allow exploiting modern active control strategies for improving vehicle suspension performance. Meanwhile, the semi-active control policies are not able to overcome a weighted unsprung adverse effect, which represents a cornerstone of the implementation in-wheel motors for a new type of electric vehicle. This paper discusses and analyses the implementation of a proposed energy-harvesting based tuned mass damper (TMD) to be implemented in electric vehicles. In this manner, a full vehicle suspension model embedded with four TMDs was created to simultaneously enhance the car comfort and road-holding responses with a corresponding large-scale energy harvesting. In the proposed 11-DOFs (degrees-of-freedom) vehicle model, the full-vehicle body was suspended using suspension systems, including the compacted back-iron based design of an electromagnetic TMD. The performed simulations indicated the considerable advantage and potentialities of using the TMDs based suspension. In terms of the RMS (root-mean-square), the car body acceleration was reduced by 21.7%, while the road-holding was enhanced by 5.7%. Moreover, the proposed regenerative electromagnetic tuned mass damper (ETMD) allows for harvesting vibration energy up to 58 W for a vehicle driven on a road class D and a speed of 30 m/s.