ADAPTIVE FUZZY LOGIC CONTROLLER FOR SEMI ACTIVE SUSPENSION

SYSTEM USING MAGNETORHEOLOGICAL DAMPER

Supervising Professor(s): Hishamuddin Jamaluddin, Roslan Abd. rahman &

Pakharuddin Mohd. Samin

ABSTRACT

Real time semi active suspension control remains a very popular and challenging topic
in academia and industry today. Ground vehicle systems have complex dynamics
characterized by non-linearity, vehicle pitch and roll, vehicle flexibility effects, static and
dynamic load effects and unknown disturbances. The result is excess vibrations that
contribute to the ride comfort and biological effects on passengers, stability of vehicle
and reduced vehicle-frame life. Semi active suspension control aims to ameliorate these
undesirable vibration effects. Ultimately, it should provide improvements to the criteria of
passenger comfort and road handling. Unfortunately, these criteria are incompatible with
each other such that current automobile suspension system using passive components
can only offer a compromise between them by providing fixed-rate spring and damping
coefficients.

This dissertation presents a semi active suspension control approach for a passenger
vehicle. It consists of outer loop controller for disturbance rejection and inner loop
controller for force tracking controller of magnetorheological damper. An adaptation rule
of adaptive fuzzy logic controller optimized by Newton method (second order
optimization) is derived and used online in both inner loop and outer loop controllers.
The performance is compared with some basic control strategies of semi active
suspension system such as skyhook, groundhook and hybrid skyhook groundhook
controllers.

Four units magnetorheological damper are installed in parallel with the existing
suspension system of experimental vehicle. An instrumented experimental vehicle and
real time control system is developed in Automotive Development Center (ADC) of UTM
to facilitate the implementation of the control algorithm. The complete system has been
successfully implemented on a National Passenger Vehicle of Malaysia using a PC
based controller. Experimental results show that the body acceleration, suspension
deflection and some handling criteria are decreased and the ride comfort is improved.