Active camber and toe control strategy for the double wishbone suspension system

Abstract

The present research work proposes a method for improving handling characteristics of the vehicle by controlling camber and toe angle using double wishbone suspension arms in an adaptive manner. This is accomplished by two telescopic arms with actuators which changes camber and toe angle of the wheel dynamically to deliver best possible traction and manoeuvrability. Active suspension controllers are employed to trigger the actuators based on the camber and toe angle from sensors for reducing the existing error. Hence the arms are driven by the actuators in a closed loop feedback manner with help of a separate PID controller. A quarter car physical models with double wishbone suspension is modelled in SolidWorks and simulated using MATLAB for analysis. The simulation result shows an improvement of 58% in camber and 96% improvement of toe characteristics. A prototype of the proposed system is developed and subjected to the same test as the simulation system. The prototype achieved an improvement of 46.34% in camber and a 93.35% in the toe variation of the active system over the passive system. Further, the prototype was able to achieve 89% of camber reduction and 45% of toe reduction with respect to the simulation. Keywords: Active suspension system, Active camber control, Active toe control, Vehicle handling, Double wishbone suspension