A novel design of a planar suspension system (PSS) is proposed to overcome the limitation of a conventional vehicle suspension system that cannot sufficiently absorb the vibrations and shocks caused by the road obstacles in the longitudinal direction because of the very stiff longitudinal connections between the chassis and the wheels. The rather stiff longitudinal linkages are replaced by a spring–damper strut. The results of the investigation into the transient handling behaviour of a vehicle with a PSS in three different scenarios are presented. These include a vehicle turning on a bumpy road, a vehicle turning combined with braking, and a lane change manoeuvre combined with acceleration. The results obtained from this study demonstrate that the PSS vehicle can effectively suppress the vibrations and shocks in the longitudinal direction without causing the handling performance to deteriorate. It has been shown that the vehicle-handling behaviour is generally comparable with, and under some conditions even better than, those reported for vehicles with a conventional suspension system.
Control Strategies for Vehicle Suspension System Featuring Magnetorheological (MR) Damper
