Analytical design of PID controller for enhancing ride comfort of active vehicle suspension system

In this paper, a new design of proportional-integral-derivative (PID) controller for the active vehicle suspension system (AVSS) of a quarter car model is proposed on the basis of the well-known Internal Model Control (IMC) theory in order to compromise the two conflicting criteria between the passenger ride comfort and road handling. By using the given mathematical ordinary differential equations (ODEs) and state-space matrix expression in t-domain via the kinematic and dynamic of a quarter two degrees of freedom model, the transfer function is firstly established for its model and the proposed AVSS based PID control is then systematically introduced for enhancing the ride comfort. Moreover, the computer simulation model of the passive and active suspension systems is established for the purpose of having a fair comparison. A various kinds of the road input signals are selected for testing the systems, such as unit step, sine wave, and white noise signals. The simulation results indicate that the performance of proposed AVSS has the significantly improved in terms of reducing the peak overshoot of sprung mass displacement and sprung mass acceleration in compared with the other traditional passive suspension systems.