Investigation of active anti-roll bars and development of control algorithm

Active anti-roll bars have recently found greater acceptance among premium car manufacturers and optimal application of this technology has emerged as an important field of research. This thesis investigates the potential of implementing active anti-roll bars in a passenger vehicle with the purpose of increasing customer value. For active anti-roll bars, customer value is defined in terms of vehicle’s ride comfort and handling performance. The objective with this thesis is to demonstrate this value through development of a control algorithm that can reflect the potential improvement in ride comfort and handling. A vehicle with passive anti-roll bars is simulated for different manoeuvres to identify the potential and establish a reference for the development of a control algorithm and for the performance of active anti-roll bars. While ride is evaluated using single-sided cosine wave and single-sided ramps, handling is evaluated using standardized constant radius, frequency response and sine with dwell manoeuvres.The control strategy developed implements a combination of sliding mode control, feed forward and PI-controllers. Simulations with active anti-roll bars showed significant improvement in ride and handling performance in comparison to passive anti-roll bars. In ride comfort, the biggest benefit was seen in the ability to increase roll damping and isolating low frequency road excitations. For handling, most significant benefits are through the system’s ability of changing the understeer behaviour of the vehicle and improving the handling stability in transient manoeuvres. Improvement in the roll reduction capability during steady state cornering is also substantial. In conclusion, active anti-roll bars are undoubtedly capable of improving both ride comfort and handling performance of a vehicle. Although the trade-off between ride and handling performance is significantly less, balance in requirements is critical to utilise the full potential of active anti-roll bars. With a more comprehensive control strategy, they also enable the vehicle to exhibit different driving characteristics without the need for changing any additional hardware