Enhancing the roll stability of heavy vehicles by using an active anti-roll bar system

Abstract

Vehicle rollover is a very serious problem for the safety of heavy vehicles. Most modern heavy vehicles are equipped with passive anti-roll bars, however they may be not sufficient to overcome critical situations. This thesis focuses on the active anti-roll bar system, which is the most common method used to improve roll stability of heavy vehicles.The thesis research work is divided into three main parts. In the first part, an integrated model is proposed with four electronic servo-valve hydraulic actuators mounted in a linear yaw-roll model of a single unit heavy vehicle. In the second part, the active anti-roll bar system uses two control approaches in the LTI framework: LQR, Hinfty. In the third part, the grid-based LPV approach is used to synthesize the Hinfty/LPV active anti-roll bar controller with parameter dependant weighting functions, by using LPVTools.The simulation results, in the frequency and time domains, as well as the validation by using the TruckSim simulation software, show that the active anti-roll bar control is a realistic and efficient solution which drastically improves roll stability of a single unit heavy vehicle, compared to the passive anti-roll bar.