Real-time Damper Force Estimation for Automotive Suspension

Abstract

The real-time knowledge of the damper force is of paramount importance in controlling and diagnosing automotive suspension systems. This study presents a generalized H2/LPV observer for damper force estimation of a semi-active electro-rheological (ER) suspension system. First, an extended quarter-car model augmented with the nonlinear and dynamical model of the semi-active suspension system is written into the quasi-LPV formulation. Then, the damper force estimation method is developed through a generalized H2/LPV observer whose objective is to handle the impact of unknown road disturbances and sensor noise on the estimation errors of the state variables thanks to the H2 norm. The measured sprung and unsprung mass accelerations of the quarter-car system are used as inputs for the observer. The proposed approach is simulated with validated model of the 1/5-scaled real vehicle testbed of GIPSA-lab. Simulation results show the performance of the estimation method against unknown disturbances, emphasizing the effectiveness of the damper force estimation in real time.

Active Displacement Control of Pantograph-catenary System for a Half-body Railway Model

“…The works of these authors deserve attention when considering the effect of vehicle track excitations in conjunction with a spatial contact model that accounts for the interaction between the contact wire and the pantograph strip (Song, et al, 2021b). Several researchers have reported that mathematical modeling proved to be an effective approach in capturing the complex dynamic behavior of the pantograph system because of the high cost of field testing (Pham et al, 2022;Song and Li, 2021;Yu et al, 2021). However, it is found that the dynamic behavior of the pantograph system is limited when vehicle-track disturbances are considered.…”