Degree Name

Master of Philosophy


School of Electrical, Computer and Telecommunications Engineering


Dynamic testing plays an important part in the vehicle seat suspension study. However, a large amount of research work on vibration control of vehicle seat suspension to date has been limited to simulations because the use of a full-size vehicle to test the device is an expensive and dangerous task. In order to decrease the product development time and cost as well as to improve the design quality, in this research, a vibration generation platform is developed for simulating the road induced vehicle vibration in laboratory. Different from existing driving simulation platforms, this research focuses on the vehicle chassis vibration simulation and the control of motion platform to make sure the platform can more accurately generate the actual vehicle vibration movement. A seven degree-of-freedom (DOF) full-vehicle model with varying road inputs is used to simulate the real vehicle vibration. Moreover, because the output vibration data of the vehicle model is all about the absolute heave, pitch and roll velocities of the sprung mass, in order to simulate the vibration in all dimensions, a Stewart multiple-DOF motion platform is designed to generate the required vibration. As a result, the whole vibration simulator becomes a hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) system. The hardware consists of a computer used to calculate the required vibration signals, a Stewart platform used to generate the real movement, and a controller used to control the movement of the platform and implemented by a National Instruments (NI) CompactRIO board. The data, which is from the vehicle model, can be converted into the length of the six legs of the Stewart platform. Therefore, the platform can transfer into the same posture as the real vehicle chassis at that moment. The success of the developed platform is demonstrated by HIL experiments of actuators. As there are six actuators installed in the motion platform, the signals from six encoders are used as the feedback signals for the control of the length of the actuators, and advanced control strategies are developed to control the movement of the platform to make sure the platform can accurately generate the required motion even in heavy load situations. Theoretical study is conducted on how to generate the reasonable vibration signals suitable for vehicle seat vibration tests in different situations and how to develop advanced control strategies for accurate control of the motion platform. Both simulation and experimental studies are conducted to validate the proposed approaches.