Semi-Active Suspension with Power Driven Inerter and Its Performance Evaluation

The improvement of passive and active suspension performance is often constrained by fixed parameters and high energy consumption. The emergence of semi-active suspension provides a potential solution to this challenge. However, most of the existing semi-active suspensions focus on damper control strategies without inertial characteristics. This paper aims to address this gap by designing and analyzing a semi-active inerter control for vehicle suspensions.

An inerter control is proposed from the perspective of vibration power flow and realized by power driven inerter (PDI) control and power driven inerter-damper (PDID) control, respectively. To evaluate the coupling effect among the inerter, spring, and damper under different control strategies, two new indexes are also proposed: (1) the ratio of vibration power from the vehicle body to the suspension; (2) the spring contribution ratio to total body vibration power.

Analysis based on the new indexes reveals that suspensions incorporating inerter control exhibit a widened frequency bandwidth for vibration isolation. The simulation results of semi-active suspension demonstrate that PDI and PDID both provide better performance than acceleration driven damping control (ADD) in ride comfort (body acceleration), road handling (dynamic tire load), and suspension stroke (suspension working space), and improve the ride comfort performance over 23%.