H8 Control Performance of a Full-Vehicle Suspension Featuring Magnetorheological Dampers

Summary This paper presents an investigation of the feedback control performance of a full-vehicle suspension system featuring magnetorheological (MR) dampers. A cylindrical MR damper is designed and manufactured by incorporating a Bingham model of aMR fluid which is commercially available. After evaluating the field-dependent damping characteristics of the MR damper, a full-vehicle suspension system installed with 4 independent MR dampers is constructed and its governing equations of motion which include vertical, pitch and roll motions are derived. A H 8 controller which has inherent robustness against system uncertainties is formulated by treating the sprung mass of the vehicle as uncertain parameter. This is accomplished by adopting the loop shaping design procedure. For the demonstration of a practical feasibility, control performance characteristics for vibration suppression of the proposed MR suspension system are evaluated under various road conditions through the hardware-in-the-loop simulation (HILS) methodology.