Improvement on Ride Comfort of Half Vehicle Active Suspension System Using Synchronization Control Strategy

The goal of this paper is to present a system of a half vehicle that helps to improve the comfort of passengers on the road. This system is composed by a two-degree of freedom uncoupled subsystems instead of a typical four-degree of freedom coupled system. Road disturbances are applied to each subsystem with a certain time delay between front and rear axle signals which is done with the intention of providing a road simulation profile nearest to the real one. Half-vehicle open dynamics are designed to show vertical and rotational movements induced by road disturbances over the ride comfort. By means of a synchronization control strategy, that uses a virtual master subsystem and front and rear subsystems as slaves, perturbations are minimized This allows to obtain the same vertical movement in both the front and the rear axle subsystem, and no rotational movements even with time delay in road disturbances. Simulation results show that the synchronized subsystem behavior and vertical displacement of the coupled system operations work as desired. Also, the approach yields an improvement in the ride comfort.