Optimized PID Controller for Quarter-Car Active Suspension System Under Various Road Profiles

The main limitation of passive suspension system lies in their inherent compromise between ride comfort and car handling, resulting from their inability to dynamically adjust to varying road conditions. Efforts to enhance riding comfort often led to trade-offs that may compromise safety, and vice versa. This duality necessitates a more adaptable and flexible solution. Active suspension systems emerge as a transformative methodology, allowing real-time adjustments and dynamic modifications to damping characteristics. This capability effectively separates the compromise between ride enjoyment and safety, enabling an optimal equilibrium by adaptively responding to fluctuations in road conditions. This paper presents a quarter-car active suspension system to improve comfort under various road conditions. A PSO optimized PID controller is implemented to minimize both the sprung mass displacement, and the sprung mass acceleration subjected to single bump and dual bump road profile. The performance of the PSO-based PID controller is illustrated by simulation results in MATLAB, demonstrating significant improvements in body displacement and body acceleration, thereby enhancing the ride comfort by adaptively responding to road conditions in real time.