Active Electromagnetic Damping for Lightweight Electric Vehicles

Due to the low weight of most current electric vehicles, the effectiveness of commercial passive dampers is reduced when compared to current production automobiles. Active dampers allow for a significant reduction in the amount of road signal that affects the passenger body. However current active hydraulic dampers tend to be heavy and to have a power consumption that precludes their use in electric vehicles. By use of a linear electromagnetic element it is possible to create an active damper that has enough authority to provide active damping with a fraction of the weight and power consumption of a hydraulic system. A computer model of an active electromagnetic damper was constructed and the results were compared to a physical prototype. This verified the effectiveness of the damper and the low power consumption. This computer model was then scaled up for the simulation of a real world quarter car model. This simulation demonstrated that the use of the active linear electromagnetic damper was more effective at all frequencies when compared to an ideal passive damper. It was also demonstrated that the active electromagnetic damper had a similar mass to a passive damper and had a power consumption of more than an order of magnitude less than a comparable active hydraulic damper.