Development of an active suspension scale vehicle platform

Active suspension has shown an ability to selectively improve various aspects of suspension performance. These criteria can range from limiting vertical accelerations to more economically using suspension or tire deflections. This is used as a starting point in the development of a quarter car test apparatus. -- This research develops optimal controllers for various car models and provides a comparison which is useful in determining required model complexity. An electrical model of an actuator is incorporated into the more basic quarter car model and again an optimal controller is developed and simulated. The results show that there is potential for real world applications using a slightly more complex optimal controller incorporating an actuator model. Using these simulations various parameters are generated to develop a design of a quarter car test apparatus. Initial work on a development of an actuator was conducted which led to the selection of an off-the-shelf voice coil along with other various parts. Being mindful of future developments, the test apparatus was designed and developed around a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) based controller. The FPGA has potential for high speed parallel processing which makes it ideal for running multiple controllers simultaneously as well as implementing mathematically intensive operations but at a significant cost in development time. A basic optimal control implementation was developed and tested and proved to function very well, opening the possibilities of other development