Fault tolerant control with additive compensation for faults in an automotive damper?

A novel Fault-Tolerant Controller is proposed for an automotive suspension system based on a Quarter of Vehicle (QoV) model. The design is divided in a robust Linear Parameter-Varying controller used to isolate vibrations from external disturbances and in a compensation mechanism used to accommodate actuator faults. The compensation mechanism is based on a robust fault detection and estimation scheme that reconstructs a fault on the semi-active damper; this information is used to reduce the failure effect into the vertical dynamics to achieve good control performances. Validations have been made over a QoV model in CarSimTM. Results show the effectiveness of the fault-tolerant semi-active damper versus an uncontrolled damper; the improvement is 50.4% in comfort and 42.4% in road holding, by avoiding biases in the damper deflection.