Energy regeneration from suspension dynamic modes and self-powered actuation

Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.This paper concerns energy harvesting from vehicle suspension systems. The generated power associated with bounce, pitch and roll modes of vehicle dynamics is determined through analysis. The potential values of power generation from these three modes are calculated. Next, experiments are carried out using a vehicle with a four jack shaker rig to validate the analytical values of potential power harvest. For the considered vehicle, maximum theoretical power values of 1.1kW, 0.88kW and 0.97kW are associated with the bounce, pitch and roll modes, respectively, at 20 Hz excitation frequency and peak to peak displacement amplitude of 5 mm at each wheel, as applied by the shaker. The corresponding experimentally power values are 0.98kW, 0.74kW and 0.78kW. An experimental rig is also developed to study the behavior of regenerative actuators in generating electrical power from kinetic energy. This rig represents a quarter-vehicle suspension model where the viscous damper in the shock absorber system is replaced by a regenerative system. The rig is able to demonstrate the actual electrical power that can be harvested using a regenerative system. The concept of self-powered actuation using the harvested energy from suspension is discussed with regard to applications of self-powered vibration control. The effect of suspension energy regeneration on ride comfort and road handling is presented in conjunction with energy harvesting associated with random road excitations.Peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio

Robust Fixed-Order Controller Design with Common Lyapunov Strictly Positive Realness Characterization

This paper investigates the design of a robust fixed-order controller for a polytopic system with interval uncertainties, with the aim that the closed-loop stability is appropriately ensured and the performance specifications on sensitivity shaping are conformed in a specific finite frequency range. Utilizing the notion of common Lyapunov strictly positive realness (CL-SPRness), the equivalence between strictly positive realness (SPRness) and strictly bounded realness (SBRness) is elegantly established; and then the specifications on robust stability and performance are transformed into the SPRness of newly constructed systems and further characterized in the framework of linear matrix inequality (LMI) conditions. Compared with the traditional robust controller synthesis approaches, the proposed methodology here avoids the tedious yet mandatory evaluations of the specifications on all vertices of the polytopic system; only a one-time checking of matrix existence is needed exclusively, and thus the typically heavy computational burden involved (in such robust controller design problems) is considerably alleviated. Moreover, it is noteworthy that the proposed methodology additionally provides essential necessary and sufficient conditions for this robust controller design with the consideration of a prescribed finite frequency range; and therefore significantly less conservatism is attained in the system performance.Comment: 10 pages, 6 figure