Influence of tire damping on mixed H2/H∞ synthesis of half car active suspensions

In this paper, multi-objective control of a half-car suspension system using linear matrix inequalities is studied. It is observed that when tire damping is precisely known, road-holding quality of the suspension system can be improved to some extent by the design procedure while ride comfort and compactness of suspension rattling space are only slightly affected as tire damping coefficients are increased. In the absence of tire damping information, a robust controller is designed for a suspension system with polytopic tire damping uncertainties. In contrast to multi-objective control of quarter-car models with polytopic tire damping uncertainties, this robust design does not offer any advantage over an active suspension system designed by neglecting tire damping. The results, based on the assumption that the front and the rear road velocity inputs are uncorrelated white-noise processes, demonstrate that the body pitch significantly impacts the closed-loop performance of the active suspension system. This implies that decomposition of a half-car model into two independent quarter-car models by a linear transformation is not realistic for a study of the performance limitations and the trade-offs. (C) 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.