Theoretical investigation of the rail vehicle suspension system using different optimised controllers by harmony search algorithm incorporating magnetorheological dampers

Abstract

Magnetorheological (MR) dampers are highly valuable semi-active devices for vibration control applications rather than active actuators in terms of reliability and implementation cost. This paper offers a deeply theoretical investigation into the use of proportional integral derivative (PID), fractional order PID (FOPID), and single-neuron PID (SNPID) for the first time in conjunction with the damper controller of a rail semi-active MR vehicle suspension. The different gains of the three mentioned controllers are tuned and optimised using the harmony search (HS) algorithm to achieve good suspension performance in the vertical direction. The self-adaptive global best harmony search (SGHS) method is selected to optimise controllers' gains due to its effectiveness in reducing tuning time and minimising the objective function value. A quarter-rail vehicle model consisting of six degrees of freedom (6-DOF) is derived and simulated using MATLAB/Simulink software. System performance criteria are evaluated in the time and frequency domains to evaluate the effectiveness of proposed controllers. The simulated results show that the SNPID significantly improves ride comfort over the applied controllers.