Vehicle Evaluation of the Performance of Magneto Rheological Dampers for Heavy Truck Suspensions

Abstract

This study is intended to complement many existing analytical studies in the area of semiactive suspensions by providing a field evaluation of semiactive magneto rheological (MR) primary suspensions for heavy trucks. A set of four controllable MR dampers are fabricated and used experimentally to test the effectiveness of a semiactive skyhook suspension on a heavy truck. In order to evaluate the performance of the semiactive suspensions, the performance of the truck equipped with the MR dampers is primarily compared with the performance of the truck equipped with the stock passive dampers. The performance of the semiactive system and the original passive system are compared for two different driving conditions. First, the truck is driven over a speed bump at approximately 8–11 kmh (5–7 mph) in order to establish a comparison between the performance of the MR and stock dampers to transient inputs at the wheels. Second, the truck is driven along a stretch of relatively straight and level highway at a constant speed of 100 kmh (62 mph) in order to compare the performance of the two types of dampers in steady state driving conditions. Acceleration data for both driving conditions are analyzed in both time and frequency domains. The data for the speed bumps indicate that the magneto rheological dampers used (with the skyhook control policy) in this study have a small effect on the vehicle body and wheel dynamics, as compared to the passive stock dampers. The highway driving data shows that magneto rheological dampers and the skyhook control policy are effective in reducing the root mean square (RMS) of the measured acceleration at most measurement points, as compared to the stock dampers.

Temperature Sensitive Controller Performance of MR Dampers

“…To name just a few, methods include inverse damper functions using neural networks (Xia, 2003) and polynomials (Du et al, 2005), feedback controllers such as PID (Lee and Choi, 2000) and proportional control (Sims et al, 1999), sliding mode control (Choi et al, 2003, as well as more straightforward techniques such as onoff control (Simon and Ahmadian, 2001) and gain scheduling (Choi et al, 2003, Yoshida andDyke, 2004). In general, there is a lack of consensus on to how to best perform control, and few investigations attempt to compare methods (Batterbee and Sims, 2005).…”

An Experimental Design of Bypass Magneto-Rheological (MR) damper

“…The properties of MR damper can be changed by changing applied current [1]. MR damper have been chosen over a decade for vehicle suspension system [2][3][4], helicopters seat [5], civil structure base isolation [6][7][8], and railway transport [9,10]. Semi-active MR damper is especially applicable for unpredictable motion conditions and capable large payload condition.…”

Vibration isolation with smart fluid dampers: a benchmarking study

“…In semi-active vibration control, on/off skyhook control strategies are commonly investigated (Cebon et al 1996;Simon and Ahmadian 2001). The strategy involves switching the input current to a predetermined and constant level when the force required by the skyhook control law is a dissipative one:…”

“…Examples include the optimal control of structures (Jansen and Dyke 2000;Yi et al 2001;Yoshida and Dyke 2004) and skyhook control of vehicle suspensions (Simon and Ahmadian 2001), where the smart damper current is switched to a pre-determined level when a dissipative force is required within the controllable range of the device. Alternatively, approximate linear relationships between the control current and the maximum damping force have been investigated (Yoshida and Dyke 2004).…”