S. B.

Choi
e-mail: seungbok@dragon.inha.ac.kr

Y. T. Choi
D. W. Park
Smart Structures and Systems Laboratory,
Department of Mechanical Engineering,
Inha University,
Incheon 402-751, Korea

A Sliding Mode Control of a

Full-Car Electrorheological
Suspension System Via Hardware
in-the-Loop Simulation
This paper presents a feedback control performance of a full-car suspension system
featuring electrorheological (ER) dampers for a passenger vehicle. A cylindrical ER
damper is designed and manufactured by incorporating a Bingham model of an ER fluid
which is commercially available. After evaluating field-dependent damping characteristics of the ER damper, a full-car suspension system installed with four independent ER
dampers is then constructed and its governing equation of motion, which includes vertical, pitch, and roll motions, is derived. A sliding mode controller, which has inherent
robustness against system uncertainties, is then formulated by treating the sprung mass as
uncertain parameter. For the demonstration of a practical feasibility, control characteristics for vibration suppression of the proposed ER suspension system are evaluated under
various road conditions through the hardware-in-the-loop simulation (HILS).
S0022-04340002801-X

Introduction

Recently, focus on the vibration suppression of a vehicle system has been significantly increased. The vehicle vibration needs
to be attenuated from various road conditions. This is normally
accomplished by employing suspension system. So far, three
types of suspensions have been proposed and successfully
implementedpassive, active, and semiactive. The passive suspension system featuring oil damper provides design simplicity
and cost-effectiveness. However, performance limitations are inevitable. On the other hand, the active suspension system provides
high control performance in wide frequency range. However, the
active suspension requires high power sources, many sensors,
servo-valves, and sophisticated control logic. One way to resolve
these requirements of the active suspension system is to use the
semiactive suspension system. The semiactive suspension system
offers a desirable performance generally enhanced in the active
mode without requiring large power sources and expensive hardware. Recently, a very attractive and effective semiactive suspension system featuring ER electrorheological fluids has been proposed by many investigators.
Petek 1 proposed a monotube type ER damper and demonstrated its superiority over conventional damper by showing that
the damping force of the ER damper could be increased with
respect to applied electric field regardless of the piston velocity. In
addition, he applied the ER damper to the rear suspension of a
passenger vehicle and reported that the ER damper could provide
better performance than a conventional one when driving over
road and bump profiles. However, these results were obtained by
applying only constant electric fields without a feedback controller. More recently, Petek et al. 2 constructed a semi-active full
suspension system consisting of four ER dampers and then evaluated its effectiveness for vibration isolation. They experimentally
demonstrated that unwanted pitch, heave, and roll motions of the
vehicle body were favorably suppressed using the simple skyhook
control algorithm. Lou et al. 3 classified the type of ER dampers
into three modes: flow-mode, shear mode, and mixed-mode. They
Contributed by the Dynamic Systems and Control Division for publication in the
JOURNAL OF DYNAMIC SYSTEMS, MEASUREMENT, AND CONTROL. Manuscript
received by the Dynamic Systems and Control Division April 10, 1998. Associate
Technical Editor: Woong-Chul Yang.

114 Vol. 122, MARCH 2000

theoretically analyzed the performance of all three modes of ER

dampers focusing on the difference of pressure drop induced by a
sinusoidal flow, but experimental work was not undertaken. Sturk
et al. 4 proposed a high voltage supply unit for controlling the
voltage applied to the ER damper and experimentally evaluated its
performance. In order to do this, they manufactured a small-sized
ER damper and applied it to a quarter car suspension system.
They demonstrated the effectiveness for vibration isolation of the
suspension system with the proposed high voltage supply unit.
Nakano 5 constructed a quarter car suspension system model
using an ER damper and proposed two control strategies: constant
control voltage and square root of control voltage proportional to
absolute velocity of unsprung mass. He numerically demonstrated
the superiority of the latter control scheme to the former one by
showing the level of vibration isolation of the suspension system
in the frequency and time domains. Gordaninejad et al. 6 experimentally evaluated the performance of cylindrical, multielectrode
ER dampers under forced vibration. They proposed simple control
algorithms such as bangbang and linear proportional controller,
and experimentally demonstrated the successful implementation
of the control schemes to a closed-loop system.
So far, most of analytical researches for the ER suspension
system have limited their scopes to a quarter car model, while
some experimental researches have focused on the vibration isolation of the half or full-car ER suspension system. Moreover, of
the research published, none deals with the reliability of the ER
suspension control system, which is easily subjected to parameter
uncertainties and external disturbance in practice. Consequently,
the main contribution of this study is to construct a mathematical
model for a full-car ER suspension system, and also to show how
the full-car ER suspension system subjected to system uncertainties can effectively attenuate the vibration through a feedback
controller. In order to accomplish the goal, we first design and
manufacture a cylindrical ER damper. Subsequently, a dynamic
model for the full-car suspension system installed with ER dampers is derived, and a sliding mode controller is designed to reduce
the vibration level due to external excitation. Control responses
for vibration isolation are tested by adopting the hardware-in-theloop simulation HILS method and presented in both time and
frequency domains.

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ER Damper

The schematic diagram of the ER damper proposed in this

study is shown in Fig. 1. The ER damper is divided into the upper
and lower chambers by the piston, and it is fully filled with the ER
fluid. By the motion of the piston, the ER fluid flows through the
duct between inner and outer cylinders from one chamber to the
other. The positive voltage is produced by a high voltage
supply unit connected to the inner cylinder and the negative
voltage connected to the outer cylinder. On the other hand, the gas
chamber located outside of the lower chamber acts as an accumulator of the ER fluid induced by the motion of the piston. In the
absence of electric fields, the ER damper produces the damping
force only caused by the fluid resistance. However, if a certain
level of the electric field is supplied to the ER damper, the ER
damper produces additional damping force owing to the yield
stress of the ER fluid. This damping force of the ER damper can
be continuously tuned by controlling the intensity of the electric
field.
In order to simplify the analysis of the ER damper, it is assumed that the ER fluid is incompressible and that pressure in one
chamber is uniformly distributed. The pressure drops due to the
geometric shape of the electrode gap and fluid inertia are assumed
to be negligible. For laminar flow in electrode gap, the fluid resistance from the duct is given by
R e

12 L
bh 3

(1)

Here L is electrode length, b is electrode width, h is the electrode

gap, and is viscosity of the ER fluid. By assuming that the gas
does not exchange much heat with its surroundings, hence considering its relation as adiabatic variation, the compliance of the
gas chamber is obtained by
C g

V0
P 0

(2)

Here V 0 and P 0 are initial volume and pressure of the gas chamber, respectively, and is the specific heat ratio. On the other
hand, the pressure drop due to the increment of the yield stress of
the ER fluid is given by
L
P ER2 E
h

(3)

Here E is the electric field. The and are intrinsic values of the
ER fluid to be experimentally determined. In this study, for the
ER fluid, the commercial one Rheobay, TP Al 3565 is used and
its yield stress at room temperature is reported by 591E 1.42 Pa 7.
Here the unit of E is kV/mm. It is herein noted that the Bingham
model of the ER fluid 8 is adopted for the derivation of Eqs. 1
and 3.

Fig. 2 Damping force versus piston velocity at various electric

fields: a measured; b simulated

Now, the damping force (F e ) of the ER damper can be written

as follows:
F e k e x p c e x p F ER sgn x p

k e

Journal of Dynamic Systems, Measurement, and Control

A r2
Cg

c e A p A r 2 R e ,

F ER A p A r P ER

Here x p and x p are excitation displacement and velocity, respectively; A p and A r represent piston and piston rod areas, respectively; and sgn() is a signum function.
In general, many different types of ER dampers can be devised
for various applications. The size and the level of required damping force adopted in this study are chosen on the basis of the
conventional passive oil damper for a small-sized passenger car.
The electrode length L and gap h of the proposed ER damper
are 258 and 0.75 mm, respectively. The photograph of the ER
damper manufactured in this study is shown in Fig. 1b.
Figure 2a presents the measured damping force with respect
to the piston velocity at various electric fields. This plot is obtained by calculating the maximum damping force at each velocity. The piston velocity is changed by increasing the excitation
frequency from 0.4 to 3.0 Hz, while the excitation amplitude is
maintained to be constant by 22 mm. This type of the plot is
frequently used in damper manufacturing industry for the evaluation of the level of damping performance. As the electric field
increases the damping force increases, as expected. Figure 2b
presents a corresponding simulation result. Comparing this with
Fig. 2a, the simulation result agrees fairly well with the measured one. This indicates that the damping model of the ER
damper given by Eq. 4 is reasonably acceptable.

3
Fig. 1 The proposed ER damper: a Schematic configuration;
b photograph

(4)

Here,

Full-Car ER Suspension System

3.1 Dynamic Modeling. We can construct a mathematical

model for a full-car ER suspension system with four ER dampers
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Table 1 Parameters of the full-car ER suspension system

Parameter

Value

Parameter

Value

Parameter

Value

M
m 1 ,m 2
m 3 ,m 4
J
J
k s1 ,k s2
k s3 ,k s4

1000 kg
29.5 kg
27.5 kg
1356 kg m2
480 kg m2
20580 N/m
19600 N/m

k t1 ,k t2
k t3 ,k t4
c s1 ,c s2
c s3 ,c s4
a
b
c

200000 N/m
200000 N/m
772 N s/m
772 N s/m
0.96 m
1.44 m
0.71 m

d
Ap
Ar
L
h

0.71 m
0.00071 m2
0.00025 m2
0.258 m
0.00075 m

rithm to the ER damper. Then, the damping force of the ER

damper is measured from the hydraulic damper tester and the
measured damping force is fed back into the computer simulation.
In short, the computer simultaneously runs both the hydraulic
damper tester and high voltage amplifier during simulation loop,
and the computer simulation is performed based on the measured
data. In this study, the ER damper at rear right side is chosen for
the HILS by considering the capacity of the hydraulic damper
tester.
4.2 Control Results. Control characteristics for vibration
suppression of the full-car ER suspension system are evaluated
under two types of road excitations through HILS. The first excitation, normally used to reveal the transient response characteristic, is a bump described by
z i z b 1cos r t

for i1,2

z j z b 1cos r tD car /V

for j3,4

(17)

0.856 m/s. The second type of road excitation, normally used

to evaluate the frequency response, is a stationary random process
14 with zero mean described by
z i Vz i VW ni

i1,2,3,4

(18)

Here W ni is white noise with intensity 2 V, is the road

roughness parameter, and 2 is the covariance of road irregularity.
In random excitation, the values of road irregularity are chosen
assuming that the vehicle travels on the paved road with the constant velocity of 72 km/h 20 m/s. The values of 0.45 m1
and 2 300 mm2 are chosen in the sense of the paved road condition. The system parameters of the ER suspension system are
chosen on the basis of the conventional suspension system for a
small-sized passenger vehicle and listed in Table 1.
We first investigate the tracking performance of the hydraulic
damper tester during simulation loop prior to implementing the
HILS. Figure 7 presents suspension travel tracking performance
2

Here r 2 V/D, z b (0.035 m) is the half of the bump height,

D(0.8 m) is the width of the bump, D car(2.4 m) is the wheel
base which is defined as the distance between the front wheel and
the rear one, and V is the vehicle velocity. In the bump excitation,
the vehicle travels the bump with constant velocity of 3.08 km/h

Fig. 7 Trajectory tracking performance of the hydraulic

damper tester: a bump and b random excitation

Journal of Dynamic Systems, Measurement, and Control

Fig. 8 Controlled responses of the ER suspension system for

bump excitation: a without and b with parameter perturbations

MARCH 2000, Vol. 122 119

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Here f si k si (z si z usi )c si (z si z usi ) and f ti k ti (z usi z i ) for

i1, 2, 3, 4. In addition, M is the sprung mass and m i (i
1,2,3,4) is the unsprung mass. J and J are the pitch and roll
mass moment of inertia, respectively. k si (i1,2,3,4) is the total
stiffness coefficient of the suspension, and it is equal to the sum of
the spring constant of the suspension spring and k e . c si (i
1,2,3,4) is the damping coefficient of the suspension, and it is
equal to c e . k ti (i1,2,3,4) is stiffness coefficient of the tire. z g ,
z usi , and z i (i1,2,3,4) are the vertical displacement of sprung
mass, unsprung mass, and excitation, respectively. and are the
pitch and roll angular displacement. a, b, c, and d are the distance
between the front damper and center of gravity C.G. of the
sprung mass, the distance between the rear and C.G., the distance
between the left and C.G., and the distance between the right and
C.G., respectively. By defining the state vector as
x x 1 ,x 2 ,x 3 ,x 4 ,x 5 ,x 6 ,x 7 ,x 8 ,x 9 ,x 10 ,x 11 ,x 12 ,x 13 ,x 14 T

3.2 Controller Design. In this study, a sliding mode controller is adopted to suppress the vibration level. As a first step, we
define the following sliding surface:

1 x
g1 x
g2 x
2 x

Gx
s x
3 x
g3 x
g4 x
4 x

Here gi R114 (i1,2,3,4) and GR414. The surface gradient

matrix G is to be determined so that the sliding surface itself is
asymptotically stable. In order to determine G, the eigenvector
matrix WR1410 associated with desired eigenvalues has to be
obtained by 11:
A0 WWJB0 L

the control input vector as

is a desired eigenvalue matrix in Jordan canonical

Here JR
form and LR410 is an arbitrary matrix chosen to provide linear
combinations of the column B0 . Then the surface gradient matrix
G can be defined by

u u 1 ,u 2 ,u 3 ,u 4 T F ER1 ,F ER2 ,F ER3 ,F ER4 T

GBg0

and the disturbance vector as

Here
is generalized inverse of B0 . In other words, the surface
gradient matrix G is obtained by the inverse of expansion matrix
Wg

W]B0 . Since the inverse of W]B0 is Bg ,G forms four rows

we obtain the following state space equation;

(6)

Here AR1414, BR144 and DR144 are the system matrix,

the control input matrix, and the disturbance matrix, respectively.
In practice, the sprung mass varies by the loading conditions
such as the number of riding person and payload, and it makes the
pitch and roll mass moment of inertia to be changed. Therefore,
we consider parameter perturbations of the sprung mass and inertia in the system. From the knowledge of the practical conditions
such as the restriction of the riding person and the capacity of
payload for a small-sized passenger vehicle, the possible bounds
of uncertain system parameters can be expressed as follows:
M 0.5M 0

J J 0 J ,

J 0.5J 0

J J 0 J ,

J 0.5J 0

(7)

Here M 0 , J 0 , and J 0 represent the nominal part, while M ,

J , and J represent the uncertain part. By assuming that
so-called matching condition 10 is satisfied, these uncertainties
can be expressed by

from last row. Here Wg is the generalized inverse of W. In this

work, the desired eigenvalues of 4 are chosen to obtain the
gradient matrix G. Hence gi (i1,2,3,4) is calculated by g1
1.523 e1, 7.917, 1.566e1, 6.301, 6.519, 1.400, 1.949e2,
2.980e1, 3.441e2, 4.264e1, 2.577, 2.343e2, 2.131e1,
9.050e2, g2 3.128 e1, 1.371e1, 3.736e1, 1.213e1,
6.522, 1.426, 3.659e2, 5.956e1, 4.864e2, 2.878e1,
2.779e1, 3.541e2, 2.086e1, 8.057e2, g3 3.841 e1,
1.705e1, 2.051e1, 8.089, 1.316e1, 3.244, 4.827e2,
8.137e1, 3.983e2, 5.306e1, 1.986e2, 2.714e1,
6.726e1, 1.005e1, and g4 8.003 e3, 3.814e3, 7.936e3,
3.201e3, 1.140e3, 3.178e2, 1.325e5, 1.933e2, 1.194e5,
1.655e2, 8.931e3, 2.425e1, 6.856e2, 2.910e1.
Now in order to formulate the sliding mode controller which
guarantees stability and high performance for uncertain system
parameters, we assume that each uncertain element of A is to be
in
bounded as a i j a
i j 12. Hence, we define the matrix A
which the uncertain element has the upper bound of a i j . Consequently, we can formulate the following sliding mode controller
which satisfies the sliding mode condition s(x)(d/dt)s(x)0:
u

1
1

1 1 ,
M 0 M M 0

1 1

1
1

1 2 ,
J 0 J J 0

2 1

1
1

1 3 ,
J 0 J J 0

3 1

(8)

The matching condition physically implies that the uncertain parts

M , J , and J cannot have arbitrarily large perturbation.
Then, substituting Eq. 8 into Eq. 6, the state space equation
with the parameter uncertainties is obtained as follows:
x A0 A x B0 B uDw

(12)

Bg0

w w 1 ,w 2 ,w 3 ,w 4 T z 1 ,z 2 ,z 3 ,z 4 T,

M M 0 M ,

(11)

1010

z g ,z g , , , , ,z us1 ,z us1 ,z us2 ,z us2 ,z us3 ,z us3 ,z us4 ,z us4 T,

xAxBuDw

(10)

(9)

Here A0 and A are the nominal and uncertain part of the system
matrix, respectively. B0 and B are the nominal and uncertain
part of the control input matrix, respectively. In addition, it is
assumed that there exists a matrix function P such that B
B0 P, and P n 1. Here, represents induced matrix
norm.
Journal of Dynamic Systems, Measurement, and Control

GB0 1
x sgn s x K sgn s x
GA0 x GA
1 n
(13)

Here,
sgn(s(x)) sgn(1(x)),
sgn( 2 (x)),
sgn(3(x)),
sgn(4(x))] T , K GDn , and n 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 T with i z i
for i1,2,3,4. Then we can show that the uncertain system Eq. 9
with the controller u given by Eq. 13 satisfies the sliding mode
condition as follows:
sx

d
sxsxGx
dt
sx GA0 AxGB0 BuGDw
sx GA0 x GA0 x sgn sx
x sgnsx
GAx GA
GDw K sgn sx 0

(14)

is the identity matrix.

Here IP /(1 n )1 and IR
Since the controller u includes the sign function, undesirable chattering may occur during control action. This may be attenuated by
44

MARCH 2000, Vol. 122 117

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Fig. 5 Schematic diagram of HILS

replacing the sign function by the saturation function with appropriated boundary layer thickness i for (i1,2,3,4). The controller u given by Eq. 13 is designed in an active actuating manner.
However, the ER damper is a semiactive actuator. Thus, the control input force should be applied to the ER suspension system
according to the following actuating condition.
u i

ui

for u i z usi z si 0

for u i z usi z si 0

i1,2,3,4

(15)

This condition physically implies that the actuating of the controller u i only assures the increment of energy dissipation of the
stable system 13. Once the control input u i is determined, the
control electric field to be applied to the ER damper is obtained
from Eq. 4 as follows.
E i

ui
h

A p A r 2L

1/

i1,2,3,4

(16)

In this study, the maximum control electric field applied to the ER

damper is limited to 3 kV/mm due to the electric breakdown of
ER fluids. In addition, the control parameters for the sliding mode
control are chosen as follows: n 0.01, K5 e10, and i
0.001 for i1,2,3,4.

In this study, HILS is undertaken to evaluate the performance

of the full-car ER suspension system. The configuration of the
proposed HILS is schematically shown in Fig. 5. The HILS is
divided into three parts: interface, hardware, and software. The
interface part is composed of computer IBM, Pentium-133 MHz
on which DSP board Mtt, TMS320C31 is mounted. To drive the
DSP board in real time, Matlab program with Simulink toolbox is used and its looping time is chosen by 0.9 ms. The hardware part is composed of the ER damper, high voltage amplifier
Trek 10/10A, and hydraulic damper tester hydraulic power
unit. The software part consists of the theoretical model for the
full-car ER suspension system and control algorithm programmed
in the computer. The photograph of each component for the HILS
is shown in Fig. 6. As a first step, the computer simulation for the
full-car ER suspension system is performed with initial value.
This computer simulation is incorporated with the hydraulic
damper tester which applies the displacement suspension travel
to the ER damper according to the demand signal obtained from
the computer. It is also connected to the high voltage amplifier
which applies control electric field determined from control algo-

Control Responses Via HILS

4.1 Configuration of HILS. It generally takes a long time

and a high cost to successfully develop the new types of components for complete systems. To save the cost and time, a theoretical analysis using computer simulation method is widely used.
However, since many real situations which are difficult to be
modeled and cannot even be modeled as an analytical method are
often neglected or approximated by linearization, the theoretical
method cannot precisely predict the performance of the system
that occurs in real field. Therefore, in order to overcome the limit
of the computer simulation method, the hardware-in-the-loop
simulations HILS is proposed recently. The HILS method has
major advantages such as easy modification of system parameters
and relatively low-cost test facilities. In addition, a wide range of
operating conditions to emulate the practical situations can be
investigated in the laboratory.
118 Vol. 122, MARCH 2000

Fig. 6 Photograph of HILS

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Table 1 Parameters of the full-car ER suspension system

Parameter

Value

Parameter

Value

Parameter

Value

M
m 1 ,m 2
m 3 ,m 4
J
J
k s1 ,k s2
k s3 ,k s4

1000 kg
29.5 kg
27.5 kg
1356 kg m2
480 kg m2
20580 N/m
19600 N/m

k t1 ,k t2
k t3 ,k t4
c s1 ,c s2
c s3 ,c s4
a
b
c

200000 N/m
200000 N/m
772 N s/m
772 N s/m
0.96 m
1.44 m
0.71 m

d
Ap
Ar
L
h

0.71 m
0.00071 m2
0.00025 m2
0.258 m
0.00075 m

rithm to the ER damper. Then, the damping force of the ER

damper is measured from the hydraulic damper tester and the
measured damping force is fed back into the computer simulation.
In short, the computer simultaneously runs both the hydraulic
damper tester and high voltage amplifier during simulation loop,
and the computer simulation is performed based on the measured
data. In this study, the ER damper at rear right side is chosen for
the HILS by considering the capacity of the hydraulic damper
tester.
4.2 Control Results. Control characteristics for vibration
suppression of the full-car ER suspension system are evaluated
under two types of road excitations through HILS. The first excitation, normally used to reveal the transient response characteristic, is a bump described by
z i z b 1cos r t

for i1,2

z j z b 1cos r tD car /V

for j3,4

(17)

0.856 m/s. The second type of road excitation, normally used

to evaluate the frequency response, is a stationary random process
14 with zero mean described by
z i Vz i VW ni

i1,2,3,4

(18)

Here W ni is white noise with intensity 2 V, is the road

roughness parameter, and 2 is the covariance of road irregularity.
In random excitation, the values of road irregularity are chosen
assuming that the vehicle travels on the paved road with the constant velocity of 72 km/h 20 m/s. The values of 0.45 m1
and 2 300 mm2 are chosen in the sense of the paved road condition. The system parameters of the ER suspension system are
chosen on the basis of the conventional suspension system for a
small-sized passenger vehicle and listed in Table 1.
We first investigate the tracking performance of the hydraulic
damper tester during simulation loop prior to implementing the
HILS. Figure 7 presents suspension travel tracking performance
2

Here r 2 V/D, z b (0.035 m) is the half of the bump height,

D(0.8 m) is the width of the bump, D car(2.4 m) is the wheel
base which is defined as the distance between the front wheel and
the rear one, and V is the vehicle velocity. In the bump excitation,
the vehicle travels the bump with constant velocity of 3.08 km/h

Fig. 7 Trajectory tracking performance of the hydraulic

damper tester: a bump and b random excitation

Journal of Dynamic Systems, Measurement, and Control

Fig. 8 Controlled responses of the ER suspension system for

bump excitation: a without and b with parameter perturbations

MARCH 2000, Vol. 122 119

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body resonance 12 Hz although the parameter perturbations

exist. However, in the frequency range between body resonance
and wheel resonance, the sprung mass acceleration is worse than
uncontrolled case. This is caused by the dynamic characteristic of
the adopted sliding mode controller. Since there is no acceleration
component in the desired values of the sliding mode controller,
the controller attenuates the vehicle motion with only displacement and velocity. It is also noted that since the ER damper is a
semiactive type actuator, the sliding mode controller has high discontinuities when the control electric field refer to Fig. 8 is
switched to zero electric field depending on velocity component.
This may cause a jerk phenomenon. It is also observed that the
tire deflection is substantially reduced at the wheel resonance.
This result may indicate the significant enhancement of the steering stability of the vehicle.

Fig. 9 Controlled frequency responses of the ER suspension

system for random excitation: a without and b with parameter perturbations

of the damper tester. The dashed line is the command signal

which is the suspension travel (z s3 z us3 ) to be determined from
computer simulation, and the solid line is the measured one from
the hydraulic damper tester. As evident in Fig. 7, the hydraulic
damper tester can track the command signal well.
Figure 8 presents controlled time responses of the ER suspension system for the bump excitation. It is generally known that the
acceleration of sprung mass and tire deflection are used to evaluate ride comfort and road holding of the vehicle, respectively. It is
seen that the vertical and pitch acceleration of sprung mass and
tire deflection are substantially reduced by employing the control
electric field determined from the sliding mode controller even in
the presence of parameter perturbations; M 500 kg, J
677 kg m2, and J 240 kg m2. This implies that the ER suspension system can simultaneously provide both good ride comfort and driving safety for a driver by applying control electric
field to the ER dampers. In addition, it is observed that the chattering in controlled responses exists even though using the sliding
mode controller with the saturation function. This is arisen from a
little discrepancy between the measured and simulated damping
force of ER dampers. On the other hand, although the applied
field is in the range of 3 kV/mm, the power consumption of the
ER damper is low owing to relatively low consumed current. It is
figured out that the maximum power consumption is about 3.4 W
during the controller implementation.
Figure 9 presents controlled frequency responses using the sliding mode controller under random excitation. The frequency responses are obtained from power spectral density PSD for the
suspension travel, the vertical and pitch acceleration of the sprung
mass, and tire deflection. As expected, all of the power spectral
densities for the suspension travel, sprung mass acceleration, and
tire deflection are substantially reduced in the neighborhood of
120 Vol. 122, MARCH 2000

Conclusions

A full-car suspension system featuring ER dampers was proposed and its feedback control performance was presented via
HILS. A cylindrical ER damper was designed and manufactured
by incorporating a Bingham model of the ER fluid. After evaluating the field-dependent damping characteristics of the ER
damper, a full-car suspension system installed with four independent ER dampers was then constructed and its governing equation
of motion was derived. In order to obtain a favorable control
performance of the ER suspension system subjected to parameter
uncertainties and external disturbances, a sliding mode controller
was designed. Control characteristics for vibration suppression of
the full-car ER suspension system under various road conditions
were evaluated through the HILS. For bump excitation, the vibration levels represented by acceleration of the sprung mass and tire
deflection were significantly reduced by adopting the sliding mode
controller. For the random excitation, control characteristics were
also remarkably enhanced by reducing the suspension travel, the
vertical acceleration of the sprung mass, and tire deflection. The
results presented in this work are self-explanatory justifying that
the full-car ER suspension system is very effective for vibration
isolation.
It is finally remarked that the performance of the ER damper
depends on the operating temperature of the ER fluid. This is
mainly due to the change of the viscosity and yield stress of the
ER fluid. In this present work, the performance variation of the
ER damper due to the temperature variation is negligible, since it
takes a short time about 10 s to realize the controller via the
HILS. However, the robustness of the control system to the temperature variation needs to be further investigated for the field test
or durability test. Moreover, a comparative work between the proposed ER suspension and conventional passive or semiactive suspension needs to be undertaken in the near future.

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