Wenxing Li

Year

2021

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Department

School of Electrical, Computer and Telecommunications Engineering

Abstract

Vehicle seat suspensions play a very important role in vibration reduction for vehicle drivers, especially for some heavy vehicles. Compared with small vehicles, these heavy vehicle drivers suffer much more from vibrations, which influence driving comfort and may cause health problems, so seat suspensions are necessary for those heavy vehicle drivers to reduce vibrations and improve driving comfort. Advanced control systems and control strategies are investigated for vehicle seat suspensions in this project. Firstly, for an active single-degree of freedom (single-DOF) seat suspension, a singular system-based approach for active vibration control of vehicle seat suspensions is proposed, where the drivers’ acceleration is augmented into the conventional seat suspension model together with seat suspension deflection and relative velocity as system states to make the suspen- sion model as a singular system. Then, an event-triggered H∞ controller is designed for an active seat suspension, where both the continuous and discrete-time event-triggered schemes are considered, respectively. The proposed control method can reduce the work- load of data transmission of the seat suspension system and work as a filter to remove the effect of noise, so it can decrease the precision requirement of the actuator, which can help to reduce the cost of the seat suspension. For complicated seat suspension systems, a singular active seat suspension system with a human body model is also established and an output-feedback event-triggered H∞ controller is designed. The accelerations of each part are considered as part of the system states, which makes the system a singular sys- tem. The seat suspension deflection, relative velocity, the accelerations of the seat frame, body torso, and head are defined as the system outputs. At last, to deal with whole-body vibration, a control system and a robust H∞ control strategy are designed for a 2-DOF seat suspension system. Two H∞ controllers are designed to reduce vertical and rotational vibrations simultaneously. All the proposed seat suspension systems and control methods are verified by simulations and some are also tested by experiments. These simulation and experimental results show their effectiveness and advantages of the proposed methods to improve the driving comfort and some can reduce the workload of data transmission.

FoR codes (2008)

091302 Automation and Control Engineering, 090203 Automotive Mechatronics, 090299 Automotive Engineering not elsewhere classified, 090602 Control Systems, Robotics and Automation

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Unless otherwise indicated, the views expressed in this thesis are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of the University of Wollongong.