Active Platform Control for a Hypercar application - System Definition and Conceptual Study

The project hereon described is a conceptual study for an active platform control system for a future hybrid hypercar by means of electromagnetic actuators to be developed in partnership with Red Bull Engineering. After an initial part of literary review and benchmarking, a full seven degree of freedom vehicle model is developed, the degrees being corner displacements, roll, pitch and ride height. The study is done over a driving manoeuvre from 0-250 km/h-0 with a bump on one side of the car and two steering inputs in order to represent a broad array of driving situations, and after an initial damper tuning in order to obtain a suitable open loop behaviour, two different strategies are investigated in order to reduce roll and pitch. First a PID closed loop control is implemented with four separate controllers for each corner and wheel displacement as a controlled variable. Afterwards a fuzzy logic system is trialled by adding the wheel vertical speed as another controlled variable, and a comparison is made in terms of performance and tunability of the two systems. Finally as a way of correlating data, the driving manoeuvre is swapped for real world data in terms of velocity and steering angle inputs taken from a run of the Nardó test track in an Aston Martin Vulcan. The output of the system is then compared to the actual traces from the displacement sensors mounted on the car, bearing in mind the lack of data from the road profile and the inaccuracy deriving from that. The two controllers are then applied on to the real world model and their performance is assessed.