Research on a simple nonlinear control strategy for a novel vehicle suspension with cam mechanism

Semi-active suspension has been widely used due to its lower energy consumption and cost. At present, it is difficult to make significant breakthroughs in the research of semi-active suspension control strategies. Therefore, it is a significant direction to innovate new structure of suspension and seek simple and effective control strategy. In this paper, a novel cam mechanism is investigated and incorporated into the half vehicle suspension system. A concise control strategy is proposed, which involves varying the damping coefficient in a linear relationship with the square of the relative speed between the vehicle body and tire. To validate the effects of the new suspension and control strategy, a 3D dynamically observable modeling and simulation approach in MATLAB/SimMechanics is proposed. The suspension model is established and simulated under excitations from bump roads and random roads. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed new structural configuration and control strategy can obtain good performance, especially at stable speeds, where it is almost 50% faster than a passive suspension. The results also indicate that the cam mechanism plays a significant role when combined with the control strategy.