Implementation of an Electromagnetic Regenerative Tuned Mass Damper in a Vehicle Suspension System
Semen Kopylov, Zhaobo Chen, Mohamed A. A. Abdelkareem
Abstract
High cost and significant power absorption do not allow exploiting modern active control strategies for improving vehicle suspension performance. Meanwhile, the semi-active control policies are not able to overcome a weighted unsprung adverse effect, which represents a cornerstone of the implementation in-wheel motors for a new type of electric vehicle. This paper discusses and analyses the implementation of a proposed energy-harvesting based tuned mass damper (TMD) to be implemented in electric vehicles. In this manner, a full vehicle suspension model embedded with four TMDs was created to simultaneously enhance the car comfort and road-holding responses with a corresponding large-scale energy harvesting. In the proposed 11-DOFs (degrees-of-freedom) vehicle model, the full-vehicle body was suspended using suspension systems, including the compacted back-iron based design of an electromagnetic TMD. The performed simulations indicated the considerable advantage and potentialities of using the TMDs based suspension. In terms of the RMS (root-mean-square), the car body acceleration was reduced by 21.7%, while the road-holding was enhanced by 5.7%. Moreover, the proposed regenerative electromagnetic tuned mass damper (ETMD) allows for harvesting vibration energy up to 58 W for a vehicle driven on a road class D and a speed of 30 m/s.