Experimental and Analytical Evaluation of an Acceleration-Based Semiactive Control Strategy for Automotive Suspension Systems with Magneto-Rheological Damper

Most of the control strategies presented to date are based on either the velocities or displacement of the vehicle body and the wheel which are derived by filtering and converting the data from the accelerometer. This increases the computational load and therefore directly affects the performance of the semiactive suspension system. This study presents a control strategy purely based on the acceleration for semiactive control of vehicle suspension with a magneto-rheological MR damper. The effectiveness of the acceleration-based skyhook (ASH) control strategy is compared with the existing velocity-based skyhook (VSH) control strategy based on the vibration response of a single-degree-of-freedom (SDOF) system. The effectiveness of ASH is evaluated experimentally, and the reaction time is evaluated analytically. The experimental results revealed that the ASH reduces the peak displacement and peak acceleration of the mass under the free vibration test and also improves the settling time as compared to VSH. The amplitude of the displacement and acceleration was also found to be reduced under the forced vibration test with maximum improvement observed during high-frequency excitation. The reaction time of ASH was also found to be considerably lower than VSH. Therefore, it was learned that the proposed ASH performed better under high-frequency excitation than under lower-frequency excitation. Moreover, the lower reaction time of the ASH could improve the overall performance of the semiactive suspension system.