The Adverse Effect and Control of Semi-active Inertial Suspension of Hub Motor Driven Vehicles

Recently, hub motor driven vehicles (HMDV) have been recognized as the ideal configuration of electric vehicles in the future. However, the adverse effect of its special structure configuration seriously affects the vehicles dynamic performance, and becomes the bottleneck of its further development and industrial application. In this paper, the characteristics of inertial suspension adjusting vertical motion inertia are utilized to suppress the HMDV adverse effect. Firstly, the coupling model of vehicle suspension and hub motor is established, and the coupling excitation of road surface and unbalanced electromagnetic force on vehicle suspension is studied. Aiming at the influence mechanism of the adverse effect, an inertial suspension model of the skyhook and groundhook (SH-GH) algorithm is established. Moreover, with the primary goal of improving the ride comfort, an inertial suspension and the mixed skyhook and power-driven-damper (SH-PDD) algorithm are combined. Particle swarm optimization (PSO) is utilized to optimize suspension performance. The results show that the RMS value of body acceleration, unbalanced radial force and dynamic tire load of inertial suspension decreased by 10.91%, 50% and 8.53%. It is proved that its characteristics can effectively suppress the HMDV adverse effects. The SH-GH inertial suspension also further reduces the vehicle performance index. The SH-PDD inertial suspension reduces the RMS value of body acceleration by 27.45%, significantly improves the vehicle ride comfort. In general, the inertial suspension proposed in this paper can effectively suppress the adverse effect of HMDV vertical vibration, and improve the HMDV ride comfort and road friendliness. It provides a new direction for the research of suppressing the adverse effect of HMDV vertical vibration.