Author Description

This dissertation, "Control of Vehicle Suspension Systems and Its Extension to General Vibration Systems" by Panshuo, Li,, was obtained from The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong) and is being sold pursuant to Creative Commons: Attribution 3.0 Hong Kong License. The content of this dissertation has not been altered in any way. We have altered the formatting in order to facilitate the ease of printing and reading of the dissertation. All rights not granted by the above license are retained by the author. Abstract: This thesis is concerned with the vibration attenuation problem of vehicle suspension systems and its extension to general vibration systems. Two research themes are considered: control methods for vehicle suspension systems and stability, performance analysis, and controller design for periodic piecewise linear systems. For vehicle suspension, control methods are proposed in order to improve ride quality, ensure ride safety and avoid structural damage. First, an adaptive suspension is designed with adjustable inerter, which can adaptively adjust its inertance. An H2 controller aiming at improving the suspension performances is designed to formulate the objective control input. The adjustable inerter adaptively varies its inertance under control to track this objective. Since the inerter cannot exert force to the system, which results in sub-optimal suspension performance, an active suspension with wheelbase preview is designed to enhance the performances. A multi-objective schme aiming at improving ride quality as far as possible subject to acceptable ride safety, avoiding structural damage and actuator saturation, is proposed for a half-car vehicle suspension model. Static output-feedback control is considered from an implementation point of view and an algorithm is presented to obtain the controller gain. Considering that the vehicle velocity may be uncertain or time-varying in practice, a multi-objective velocity-dependent contro