Copyright © 2012 Mohamed M. ElMadany. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

An optimal control design method based on the use of the correlation between the front and rear wheel inputs (wheelbase preview) is introduced and then applied to the optimum design of a slow-active suspension system. The suspension consists of a limited bandwidth actuator in series with a passive spring, the combination being in parallel with a passive damper. A three-dimensional seven degrees of freedom car riding model subjected to four correlated random road inputs is considered. The performance potential of the limited bandwidth system with wheelbase preview in comparison with the nonpreview (uncorrelated inputs) case is investigated.