A Rule-Based Damping Control of MMR-Based Energy-Harvesting Vehicle Suspension

Abstract

Traditional shock absorbers dissipate large amount of vibration energy into heat waste via viscous oil dampers. To harvest such energy and improve the vehicle suspension performance, a novel energy-harvesting shock absorber that uses a mechanical motion rectifier (MMR) is introduced with a rule-based controller to improve vehicle ride comfort as well as harvested energy under the random road excitations with different roughness classes. The ride comfort performance of the controlled MMR shock absorber with rule-based strategy is compared with the passive shock absorber, the controlled traditional shock absorber with skyhook strategy, and the controlled MMR shock absorber with SH-PDD (skyhook-power driven damper) strategy. The rule-based MMR shock absorber shows the best ride comfort performance.