Development and Implementation of Magneto-Rheological Fluid Damper In Two-Wheeler Vehicle With Real-Time Control

Abstract

The present-day automotive systems are equipped with a combination of various electromechanical sensors, actuators and devices to improve the ride quality according to the preferences of the riders. Suspension systems are one of the most important areas in which tremendous amount of research was being pursued while different technologies have been developed and incorporated. Magneto-rheological dampers are one of the technologies which can be implemented in the vehicular suspension to obtain a varied damping with respect to the road profile. This study carries out various MR damper designs which can be fabricated and implemented in two-wheeler vehicles depending on the fixtures and complexities. Two different piston designs namely axial flux based and radial flux-based designs are designed considered in the space and dimensional constrains of specific two-wheeler motor vehicles and E-bicycle (E-bike) i.e., Splendor plus (make: Hero motor corp.), Pulsar 200cc (make: Bajaj Auto) and Crest (make: Atlas cycles). The design parameters are considered by the Matlab optimization tool box considering the maximum dynamic range as the prime requirement. With the obtained dimensions, FEMM analysis is performed to obtain the magnetic flux density being produced in the fluid flow gap, estimating the flux produced for influencing the MR fluid in the damper. the designed MR dampers are fabricated and characterized for the force-velocity characteristics with respect to the changes in current under varied frequency sine excitation. These characteristics are considered for mathematical modelling. The characterization results are utilized in mathematical modeling considering either parametric or non-parametric models for the designed damper modelling. Kwok model is considered in the parametric modeling whereas the polynomial model is considered in the nonparametric modeling. Due to the reduced complexities and ease of implementation polynomial model is considered for modeling most of the MR dampers in the studies performed. The mathematical model is used in the simulation of Quarter car and two-wheeler suspension with the designed MR damper. iv Parallelly with respect to the design parameters considered for, the designed MR damper is fit to the two-wheeler vehicle and tested for certain road conditions at specific velocities. The control logic is implemented with the help of FPGA based controller and data acquisition cards namely NI cRIO 9045, NI 9230, NI 9403 and NI 9205. Different control logics were implemented in this study and the nonlinear control model namely Sliding mode control was providing better performance in reducing the body vibrations of the vehicle. The obtained results show satisfactory performance results while implementing the MR damper in the rear suspension of the two-wheeler vehicle considering the sliding mode control strategy. With the inspiration of axial and radial flux piston designs, a novel design namely hybrid radial flux piston design was designed and fabricated for a prototype MR damper. This damper utilized the orientation of the coil wound and the effective design to generate both the axial and radial fluxes with in the piston core. The characterization results of this damper also show observable change in the damping force with respect to the change in current supplied to the damper. Polynomial modeling of the damper designed is implemented in the quarter car and two-wheeler models in MATLAB / Simulink and the sprung mass acceleration is considered as priority. The obtained results confirm the effectiveness of the designed damper in vehicular implementation.