No abstract

Inerters, a new type of mass element, have been successfully applied in various fields, such as in automotive and civil engineering. The development of a new element, named a mechatronic inerter, which consists of a ball-screw inerter and permanent magnet electric machinery, proves the feasibility of adopting electrical element impedances to simulate corresponding mechanical elements. In this paper, the structures of the bridge electrical network and series-parallel electrical network and their impedance characteristics are first introduced. Then, a seven-degree-of-freedom vehicle model is established. In addition, by comparison with passive suspension, a bridge network and a series-parallel network with various basic topologies are used to improve the vibration isolation performance of mechatronic inertial suspension, and the advantages of the bridge network (a) are demonstrated. Finally, a bridge electrical network (a) was designed and a real vehicle test was carried out. The test results showed that the mechatronic inertial suspension based on the bridge network (a) was superior to the passive suspension; the RMS (root-mean-square) values of the suspension working space and dynamic tire load of the left rear wheel suspension were reduced by 21.1% and 6.3%, respectively; and the RMS value of the centroid acceleration was improved by 1.8%.

With the appearance of inerter, the ISD suspension composed of “Inerter-Spring-Damper” opens up a new direction for efficient coordination of ride comfort and road friendliness for heavy vehicles. In this paper, a reference model based on the hybrid-hook damping strategy is proposed, and the mechatronic inerter is used as an active suspension force generator in the actual controlled model. Then, the coordinated control of the vehicle ISD suspension model is realized by the model predictive control (MPC) approach. The test results show that, the RMS values of the body acceleration and dynamic tire load of the controllable ISD suspension is smaller than the traditional passive and passive ISD suspension under the sinusoidal road inputs. Under the random road input, compared with the traditional passive suspension, the controllable ISD suspension has improved the RMS value of the body acceleration by 26.61%, and the road damage coefficient has been improved by 20.13%. Experiments show that the controllable ISD suspension of heavy vehicles based on the hybrid-hook damping strategy has comprehensive improvement of vehicle ride comfort and road friendliness.