A noise-insensitive semi-active air suspension for heavy-duty vehicles with an integrated fuzzy-wheelbase preview control

Abstract

Semi-active air suspension is increasingly used on heavy-duty vehicles due to its capabilities of consuming less power and low cost and providing better ride quality. In this study, a new low cost but effective approach, fuzzy-wheelbase preview controller with wavelet denoising filter (FPW), is developed for semi-active air suspension system. A semi-active suspension system with a rolling lobe air spring is firstly modeled and a novel front axle vertical acceleration-based road prediction model is constructed. By adopting a sensor on the front axle, the road prediction model can predict more reliable road information for the rear wheel. After filtering useless signal noise, the proposed FPW can generate a noise-insensitive control damping force. Simulation results show that the ride quality, the road holding, the handling capability, the road friendliness, and the comprehensive performance of the semi-active air suspension with FPW outperform those with the traditional active suspension with PID-wheelbase preview controller (APP). It can also be seen that, with the addition of the wavelet filter, the impact of sensor noise on the suspension performance can be minimized. © 2013 Zhengchao Xie et al.