Bilinear Disturbance-Accommodating Optimal Control of Semi-Active Suspension for Automobiles

Abstract

The design of suspension very important for ride-comfort and driving stability of automobiles. A lot of active and semi-active suspensions have been studied. In recent years, the cars with active or semi-active suspension have been put into practice. Since an active suspension needs large power and space, a semi-active suspension have recently received attention because of less power consumption. In this study, the bilinear disturbance accommodating optimal control method is established and it is applied to the semi-active control of suspension for automobiles. A half car body model with 4-DOF is used in order to examine the performance of this mothod. In this model, bounce, pitch and hop mode are considered. In the simulation, performance of the proposed bilinear disturbance accommodating optimal control to the semi-active suspension is examined by comparing it with passive control, skyhook control and Karnopp's control method. As a result, the proposed method showed better performance for ride-comfort and driving stability than the other control methods.