Modeling and Control of a New 1/4t Servo-hydraulic Vehicle Active Suspension System

Nowadays, the active suspension is the key technology for vehicles to achieve both ride comfort and control performance. In this paper, a new 1/4T servo-hydraulic vehicle active suspension system is developed and two control schemes are utilized. The first one is a conventional PID controller obtained from Ziegler-Nichols method and the second one is the neural network controller. Though these two controllers are quite simple and not new, it is still worth mentioning that this paper emphasizes on the engineering aspects including the design of a servo-hydraulic test rig, the implementation technology of the controllers and the subsequent experimental study. In addition, the utilization of MATLAB/Simulink software enables the modeling and dynamic simulation of the control system. From both simulation and experimental results, it is shown that two proposed control schemes can restrain significantly the vibration and acceleration of vehicle body. However, the performance of neural network controller is somewhat better than that obtained from the PID controller.