ACTIVE AND REGENERATIVE CONTROL OF AN ELECTRODYNAMIC-TYPE SUSPENSION

Active vibration dampers and isolators are capable of reducing vibrati on, and the results are remarkable and can be achieved adaptively. How ever, they require a large amount of energy to control the vibration. Since structural vibration has motional energy, a question arises as t o how we can utilize this energy rather than just simply suppressing i t. In this paper an energy regenerative type suspension is presented w hich utilized an electrodynamic actuator to regenerate electric power during the high-speed motion of the actuator. At low-speed motion, an active control algorithm is applied to the same actuator to provide go od damping performance. In order to reduce energy loss in the control amplifier, active relay control is applied instead of linear control. The system is first simulated on a computer and followed by a simple e xperiment similar to a suspension system. The results are very encoura ging and show that the system performed better than a passive suspensi on system and can regenerate vibration energy.