Date of Award

5-2014

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Legacy Department

Automotive Engineering

Committee Chair/Advisor

Dr. Beshah Ayalew

Committee Member

Dr. Imtiaz Haque

Committee Member

Dr. Timothy Rhyne

Committee Member

Dr. Ardalan Vahidi

Abstract

The designs of commercial Anti-Lock Braking Systems often rely on assumptions of a torsionally rigid tire-wheel system and heavily rely on hub-mounted wheel speed sensors to manage tire-road slip conditions. However, advancements in high-bandwidth braking systems, in-wheel motors, variations in tire/wheel designs, and loss of inflation pressure, have produced scenarios where the tire's torsional dynamics could be easily excited by the braking system actuator. In these scenarios, the slip conditions for the tire-belt/ring will be dynamically different from what can be inferred from the wheel speed sensors. This dissertation investigates the interaction of tire torsional dynamics with ABS & traction controllers and offers new control designs that incorporate schemes for identifying and accommodating these dynamics. To this end, suitable braking system and tire torsional dynamics simulation models as well as experimental test rigs were developed. It is found that, indeed, rigid-wheel based controllers give degraded performance when coupled with low torsional stiffness tires. A closed-loop observer/nonlinear controller structure is proposed that adapts to unknown tire sidewall and tread parameters during braking events. It also provides estimates of difficult to measure state variables such as belt/ring speed. The controller includes a novel virtual damper emulation that can be used to tune the system response. An adaptive sliding-mode controller is also introduced that combines robust stability characteristics with tire/tread parameter and state estimation. The sliding mode controller is shown to be very effective at tracking its estimated target, at the expense of reducing the tire parameter adaptation performance. Finally, a modular robust state observer is developed that allows for robust estimation of the system states in the presence of uncertainties and external disturbances without the need for sidewall parameter adaptation.

Share

COinS
 
 

To view the content in your browser, please download Adobe Reader or, alternately,
you may Download the file to your hard drive.

NOTE: The latest versions of Adobe Reader do not support viewing PDF files within Firefox on Mac OS and if you are using a modern (Intel) Mac, there is no official plugin for viewing PDF files within the browser window.