Control-Configured Design on Controllable Suspensions: Active Camber as a Case Study

Controlled suspensions offer superior vehicle performance. Generally, a controllable suspension design follows a serial process of “structure first” and “control next”, which stirs up thoughts that the simultaneous optimization of both the structure system and control system may further improve the target vehicle performance. In this paper, the control-configured design on controllable suspensions (CCDCS) is proposed, which releases the constraints of the structure system and introduces the effect of the control system into the structure system, thus building a whole controllable suspension vehicle system optimization. Then, a control-configured design on active camber suspension is presented: the active camber actuator installation position is opened as an adjustable variable in the structure system, while the active camber controller is adjustable in the control system. The two systems build an interactive parallel optimization solved by genetic algorithm, where the suspension camber characteristic is taken as an interaction and the whole suspension expression is quantified as an overall evaluation. The optimized actuator installation position tends to match active camber control achieving larger right rear wheel camber under a left step-steer, thus obtaining better vehicle handling. It demonstrates that the proposed CCDCS matches the structure system and control system very well and improves vehicle performance, which helps deal with the matching and system optimization of electromechanical systems.