Concurrent research and development of a magnetic ride control system

General Motors became the first auto-manufacturer in applying magneto-rheological (MR) fluids to eliminate mechanical valves used in production controllable dampers, and achieve high performance ride and handling on its vehicles beginning with the 2002 Cadillac Seville. The successful introduction of this smart material technology into the highly demanding and cost sensitive arena of the automotive industry was made possible through a highly coordinated multi-disciplinary R&D effort at General Motors. This paper focuses only on the R&D stage of this technology development such as the MR materials selection and characterization, MR fluid-based actuator configurations for real-time suspension damping control, modeling and design optimization of the actuators and their performance prediction. Experimental results are provided to verify the predicted damping forces of the actuators based on fluid-flow models. The improvements in vehicle performance based on integrated control of the semi-active magnetic suspension actuators are also demonstrated though vehicle ride metrics test data.