A Vehicle Seat Suspension with Hybrid Control System 2001-01-0390

Although active suspensions are well known to provide improved performance over passive systems, their two main drawbacks are the required energy input levels and the high component costs. A hybrid control system is proposed which addresses these two drawbacks. Its performance is examined theoretically in a simple application in which it is used as a seat suspension coupled to a quarter car model representing the general properties of vehicle ride dynamics. The hardware for the hybrid control system is based on DC motors and a condenser, and the strategy is to store the dissipative energy obtained in the dissipative cycles for later use in the active cycles when input power is required Practical issues are transfering the rotary motor motion to linear motion and electric components of the energy regenrative damper. These are chosen to give a practical damping coefficient value and to control the seat actuator.

The performance of the hybrid control system is compared with passive and semi active systems. The hybrid control system performs better compared with passive and semi active suspension system. Although several implementation issues remain with the proposed hardware, the work has demonstrated the potential benefits of this system