Fault-tolerant Control of Semi-Active Suspension in Case of Oil Leakage of Magnetorheological Damper

The paper presents a reconfigurable fault-tolerant control strategy for a semi-active suspension using magnetorheological (MR) damper. The aim of the control reconfiguration is to handle the adverse behaviour of the MR damper due to oil leakage induced by the wear of the suspension component. The proposed method relies on the data driven model of the MR damper, using an estimation procedure to quantify the healthiness of the damper and to estimate the performance degradation due to the oil leakage. The reconfiguration control strategy is founded on the Linear Parameter Varying (LPV) framework, where a scheduling variable is defined to represent the healthiness level of the MR damper. By the scaling of the control action through the scheduling variable, the performance degradation of the MR damper can be compensated to match the behaviour of the healthy dampers. The proposed method is demonstrated through simulations, comparing the performance of the fault-tolerant LPV control to conventional semi-active control methods