Experimental Verification of Resistance Control, Semi-Active Damping

Electronically controlled vehicle suspensions offer substantial improvements in performance over conventional, passive suspensions but with the price of power, complexity, and actuating bandwidth. Low-bandwidth, semi-active damping addresses the problems of power and bandwidth by using low power modulation of controllable dampers at the frequency of the isolated mass. Resistance controlled, semi-active damping is experimentally verified to better sprung mass isolation while reducing suspension stroke, something that a passive system cannot do. It is also shown to compare reasonably well with computer simulation results. The experimental implementation is a 1/30 scale, two degree-of-freedom test bed that represents the standard quarter vehicle model.