Inertial mass modeling and compensation for an energy-harvesting vehicle suspension system with limited-DOF parallel mechanisms actuator

An energy-harvesting suspension can improve the energy efficiency of vehicle. By introducing a lower-mobility parallel mechanism as motion transfer in the energy-harvesting suspension, the stiffness of the system is significantly improved. However, the overlage equivalent of inertial mass make the system is difficult to control and imped the development of this kind of suspension. To solve the problem, an equivalent linearization model to calculate the nonlinear inertial mass of low-DOF (Degree Of Freedom) parallel mechanism actuator is studied firstly. Furthermore, a 2-DOF 1/4 suspension system dynamic model that includes inertial mass is proposed to analyze the vehicle acceleration, dynamic tire load, and dynamic stroke. On this basis, the linear-quadratic Gaussian (LQG) controller is adopted to compensate the inertial mass of the suspension to improve the system performance. Results show that the proposed model accurately reflects the characteristics of the suspension inertial mass, the root-mean-square (RMS) value of the vehicle body acceleration and suspension dynamic stroke through compensation controller is reduced by 33.4% and 30.89%, respectively. Moreover, the RMS of the dynamic tire load is reduced by 3.06%, and the system stability is improved significantly.