ACTIVE SUSPENSION CONTROL WITH DIRECT-DRIVE TUBULAR LINEAR BRUSHLESS PERMANENT-MAGNET MOTOR

Abstract

Recently, active suspension has been applied to many commercial automobiles. To develop the control algorithm for active suspension, a quarter-car test bed was built by using a direct-drive tubular linear brushless permanent-magnet motor (LBPMM) as a force-generating component. Two accelerometers and a linear variable differential transformer (LVDT) are used in this quarter-car test bed. Three pulse-width-modulation (PWM) amplifiers supply the currents in three phases. Simulated road disturbance is generated by a rotating cam. Modified lead-lag control, linear-quadratic (LQ) servo control with a Kalman filter, and the fuzzy control methodologies were implemented for active-suspension control. In the case of fuzzy control, asymmetric membership functions were introduced. This controller could attenuate road disturbance by up to 78%. Additionally, a sliding-mode controller (SMC) is developed with a different approach from the other three control methodologies. While SMC is developed for the position control, the other three controllers are developed for the velocity control. SMC showed inferior performance due to the drawback of the implemented chattering-proof method. Both simulation and experimental results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of these four control methodologies.