Effect of a hybrid controller on ride comfort under random road excitation for a semi-active suspension system

An adjustable damper is able to achieve effective anti-vibration performance by changing the damping coefficient. Therefore, this study experimentally evaluated the dynamic responses of the adjustable damper, which was subsequently incorporated into a quarter-car system. The current research employed a hybrid controller with a self-tuning fuzzy sliding-mode controller and a self-organizing learning mechanism under random road excitation (ISO 8608:1995) to verify the reliability. A single-input single-output fuzzy inference was used to adjust the slope of the sliding surface. Furthermore, the self-organizing control was developed to self-organize online fuzzy sliding rules. This study also investigated the ride comfort of the car body according to the ISO 2631-1:1997 standard. The experimental results show that the proposed controller demonstrates notable improvements in the vibration suppression of the car body and in the ride comfort, which is superior to the compared mixed skyhook-acceleration-driven damping controller.