Comparison of Air Spring Actuator and Electro-Hydraulic Actuator in Automotive Suspension System

The present article introduces an approach that combines modelling and simulation of air spring actuator and electro-hydraulic actuator for comparison in automotive suspension system. Both hydraulic and air spring actuators are controlling the vehicle body by developing a desired force between sprung mass and unsprung mass using fuzzy logic controller. The vehicle body along with the wheel system is modelled as a two degree of freedom quarter car model. The actuator performance is investigated using the quarter car suspension model under single road bump with severe peak amplitude excitations and random road input. From the results of simulation, it can be concluded that air spring actuator gave better performance than electro-hydraulic actuator in all conditions under vertical body deflection.