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Relocating the electric motor to a position inside the wheel offers a variety of benefits, such as reduced overall vehicle weight, more efficient production of vehicles, more flexible design and better road handling because of the accurate torque control on each wheel. However, the motor also increases the unsprung mass, which can impair the ride comfort of the vehicle. In this paper, we propose and investigate a control strategy using the vertical component of the driving force provided by an in-wheel motor for better ride comfort and handling dynamics. In the next stage, a mathematical model of the vehicle with coupled longitudinal, lateral, and vertical dynamics was introduced. The parameters of the vehicle were measured and collected from an actual car equipped with in-wheel motors. To analyze the performance of the controller, a model of the vehicle was tested in a series of simulations. The straight-line acceleration test indicated an improvement to the ride comfort of 31.8% in terms of the RMS vertical vibrations of the sprung mass. The control is achieved without any deterioration of the tire load and the vehicle's longitudinal dynamics. The stable lateral dynamics of the controlled vehicle was confirmed using a sine-sweep steering excitation, conducted on a perfectly smooth road surface with a constant longitudinal acceleration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Riding quality is considered a key element in automotive industry which imposes a challenge on car manufacturers to develop new alternative control strategies for the classical suspension system. To this extent, many efforts have been carried out on developing several active or semi-active suspension systems. In the past few years, the decreasing cost of electromechanical actuators has, however, opened new trends to face this challenge. Active aerodynamic surfaces (spoilers) represent an alternative and effective solution to the issue. Two contradicting criteria of good vehicle suspension performance are typically their ability to provide good road handling and increase passengers comfort. The main disturbance affecting these two criteria is terrain irregularities. Active suspension control systems reduce these undesirable effects by isolating car body motion from vibrations at the wheels. In this article, we are trying to investigate the use of active aerodynamic surfaces to enhance ride comfort in sport vehicles for half car model. The article describes also the model and controller used in the study and discusses the vehicle response results obtained from a typical road sinusoidal signal input. The effect of active aerodynamic surfaces could enhance the ride comfort by (15%) without affecting road holding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]