A Comparison of Suitable Control Methods for Full Vehicle with Four MR Dampers, Part I: Formulation of Control Schemes and Numerical Simulation

Due to significant nonlinearity of magnetorheological (MR) suspension, one of the main challenges in the application of this technology is to develop appropriate control algorithms. The main purpose of this study is to identify a suitable control method for semi-active isolation in MR suspension application. The semi-active control schemes include the following: a new proposed intelligent control scheme, Human Simulated Intelligent Control (HSIC) and three representative semi-active control schemes that are skyhook control, hybrid control algorithm, and fuzzy logic control. A full-car dynamic model considering the effect of roll motion is adopted as the baseline model for our analysis. After deriving the governing motion equations of the proposed dynamic model, the HSICler and other three controllers with nonlinearity of MR dampers are formulated. Then each control policy is applied to the baseline model equipped with four MR dampers. The performances of each control algorithm under various road conditions are compared along with the equivalent passive model in both time and frequency domains. The results indicate that the semi-active suspension with each control scheme is more effective than the passive in reducing vibration of the vehicle body. The results further indicate that HSICler performs the best among the considered control policies.