Optimal control of an electrorheological fluid suspension system for tracked vehicles

Abstract

In this paper, a controllable electrorheological fluid suspension system (ERSS) is proposed for a tracked vehicle. After identifying the Bingham properties of an electrorheological fluid, a double-rod-type ERSS is devised, and its damping characteristics are evaluated with respect to the intensity of the electric field. Subsequently, the governing equation of motion of a tracked vehicle featuring the ERSS is established followed by the formulation of a linearized state space model. An optimal controller integrated with Kalman filter is then designed in order to suppress unwanted vibrations of the tracked vehicle subjected to bump and random road excitations. Control performances such as vertical acceleration at the centre of gravity are evaluated in both time and frequency domains.

A conditional-proportional damper schedule for semi-active suspension of ground vehicles

“…Though the isolation performance can be improved with activesuspension mechanism, it comes with a heavy penalty in terms of power and cost. With an objective to improve the isolation with marginal increase in cost, the concept of semi-active suspension is proposed in literature [6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16] wherein, the damping coefficient is variable. The variation of damping coefficient can be achieved with a very low power and literature suggests that substantial improvement in the isolation performance can be achieved with this.…”

Magnetorheological Semi-Active Suspension System for a Tracked Vehicle

“…The other solusion is utiliting some function materials, such as electrorheological (ER) fluid, magnetorheological (MR) fluid , to implement damping regulation. Choi et al [3] proposed ER damper for ride comfort improvement in tracked vehicles. The yield stress of MR fluid is much higher than that of ER fluid, which has drawn considerable attention in recent years.…”