Fault tolerant strategy for semi-active suspensions with LPV accommodation?

A novel fault tolerant strategy to compensate multiplicative actuator faults (damper oil leakages) in a semi-active suspension system is proposed. The compensation of the lack of damping force caused by a faulty damper is carried on by the remainder three healthy semi-active dampers. Once a faulty damper is detected and isolated by a Fault Detection and Isolation strategy based on parity-space, an estimator is activated to compute the missing damping force to compensate. In order to fulfill the semi-active damper constraints, the fault accommodation is based on the Linear-Parameter Varying (LPV) control strategy. Thus, each corner has a fault estimator and an LPV controller oriented to comfort and road holding. Simulation results show that the proposed fault tolerant semi-active suspension improves the vehicle comfort up to 60% with respect to a controlled suspension without fault-tolerant strategy and 82% with respect to a passive suspension.