A New Generation of Magnetorheological Vehicle Suspension System With Tunable Stiffness and Damping Characteristics

As the concept of variable stiffness (VS) and variable damping (VD) has increasingly drawn attention because of its superiority on reducing unwanted vibrations, dampers with property of varying stiffness and damping have been an attractive method to further improve vehicle performance and driver comfort. This paper presents the design, prototyping, modeling, and experimental evaluation of a VS and VD magnetorheological (MR) vehicle suspension system. It was first characterized by an INSTRON machine. Then, a phenomenological model was proposed to capture the characteristics of the damper and TS fuzzy approach was used to model the quarter car system where the proposed damper was installed. Different controllers, including skyhook, short-time Fourier transform and state observer based controller were designed to control the damper. Experimental results demonstrate that the quarter car system with the VS and VD suspension performs best in terms of reducing the sprung mass accelerations comparing with other suspensions.