Improving Ride Comfort of a Soil Compactor based on the NSS Embedded into the Seat's Semiactive Suspension

Three dynamic models (1-D, 2-D, and 3-D) of a soil compactor are established to research the vehicle's ride comfort via numerical simulation and experiment. Based on the efficiency of the semi-active control (SAC) of the Fuzzy-PID controller and the negative stiffness structure (NSS), a new suspension of the driver's seat equipped with the SAC and NSS is proposed to further improve the soil compactor's ride comfort under the various working conditions of the vehicle on the elastoplastic soil ground. The reduction of the root-mean-square seat acceleration (a_ws) in the time domain and the power-spectral-density seat acceleration (PSD) in the frequency domain is chosen as the objective function. The study indicates that the seat's acceleration response in the time domain with the 1-D, 2-D, and 3-D models of the soil compactor is similar. However, the a_ws and maximum PSD acceleration of the driver's seat with the 1-D model are higher than that of the 3-D model by 35.9% and 58.5%, while the acceleration response and PSD acceleration of the driver's seat with the simulation of the 3-D model are similar to the experiment. Therefore, the different dynamic models of the vehicle remarkably affect the investigation result. With the driver's seat suspension equipped with the SAC and NSS, the $a_{ws$ and maximum PSD acceleration of the driver's seat are strongly decreased by 80.1% and 87.6% compared to the seat's passive suspension without the SAC and NSS. Additionally, these values are also lower than that of oth the SAC and NSS under various simulation conditions. Consequently, the driver's seat suspension equipped with the SAC and NSS could be used to further improve the ride comfort of the soil compactor.