Analysis of Active Vehicle Suspension System with Controllers using Simulation

Traditionally automotive suspension designs have been a compromise between three conflicting criteria of road holding, load carrying and passenger comfort. The suspension system must support the vehicle, provide directional control during handling maneuvers and provide effective isolation of passenger payload from road disturbances. Good ride comfort requires a soft suspension whereas insensitivity to applied load requires stiff suspension. Good handling requires a suspension setting somewhere between the two. The objective of this paper is to develop an active control law for the suspension system , for this only a quarter model of the vehicle suspension system with two degree of freedom is conceived and then effect of various types of input (Step, impulse) on the passive quarter model is evaluated followed by application of various control algorithms like PID control, Active force control using Crude approximation and Iterative learning method, Fuzzy logic is applied on the quarter model and the results are tabulated. The effect of inputs on different control laws is found and the results are compared which gives the relative significance of various control algorithms. The software utilized is MATLAB version 2009.