Modeling and Optimization of Vehicle Suspension Employing a Nonlinear Fluid Inerter

An ideal inerter has been applied to various vibration engineering fields because of its superior vibration isolation performance. This paper proposes a new type of fluid inerter and analyzes the nonlinearities including friction and nonlinear damping force caused by the viscosity of fluid. The nonlinear model of fluid inerter is demonstrated by the experiments analysis. Furthermore, the full-car dynamic model involving the nonlinear fluid inerter is established. It has been detected that the performance of the vehicle suspension may be influenced by the nonlinearities of inerter. So, parameters of the suspension system including the spring stiffness and the damping coefficient are optimized by means of QGA (quantum genetic algorithm), which combines the genetic algorithm and quantum computing. Results indicate that, compared with the original nonlinear suspension system, the RMS (root-mean-square) of vertical body acceleration of optimized suspension has decreased by 9.0%, the RMS of pitch angular acceleration has decreased by 19.9%, and the RMS of roll angular acceleration has decreased by 9.6%.