Advanced Control Techniques for Semi-Active Suspension Systems

Semiactive suspension system provides comfort and precise support for any type of driving in vehicles. Their main feature consists in the modification of the damping coefficient by applying an external control. Commonly, these suspensions work with non-linear dampers, such as magnetorheological, electrorheological, pneumatic, dry friction, among others; which generate a discontinuous behavior of force, causing an annoying noise known as “chattering”; however, this can be deleted by the correct application of the control technique. So, control strategy selection is a key task in the modeling of dynamic behavior and to describe the variation of characteristics, as well as to achieve the best vehicle’s driving experience in terms of comfort, performance, reliability, stability, and safety. This article shows three advanced control techniques used to design a semi-active vehicle suspension taking the quarter car as the model. From the review of the state of the art, relevant works and authors on the subject are reported. After, the application of the control techniques is shown together with the results obtained, specially, the performance of the system is carried out by means of computer simulations in the Matlab/Simulink virtual environment, accompanied by near-reality disturbances to verify the effectiveness of this study.