Semi-active control of a new quasi-zero stiffness air suspension for commercial vehicles based on event-triggered H_∞ dynamic output feedback

To further improve the multi-objective comprehensive vibration isolation performance of commercial vehicles and save network resource occupation, this paper proposes a new configuration of semi-active quasi-zero stiffness air suspension (QZSAS) with network communication architecture, and a matching dynamic output feedback control (DOFC) strategy considering event-triggered mechanism. The semi-active QZSAS is mainly composed of a positive stiffness air spring, a pair of negative stiffness double-acting cylinders and two continuous damping controlled (CDC) dampers. Event-triggered mechanism determines whether the control signal is updated by judging the measured signal to save communication resources. Firstly, the nonlinear stiffness of the suspension system is regarded as an uncertain parameter and processed by constructing a Takagi–Sugeno (T-S) fuzzy controller model. Then, the Lyapunov–Krasovskii functional method is employed to design the dynamic output feedback controller under the linear matrix inequality constraint to ensure system stability with H_∞ performance index. Finally, the co-simulation and hardware-in-the-loop (HiL) test results show that the presented new semi-active QZSAS structure and the DOFC method considering event-triggered mechanism can significantly improve the multi-objective performance of commercial vehicles under different driving conditions with significantly reducing the network communication burden.