Search Results

Reliability has always been an important aspect in the assessment of industrial products and/or equipments. Good product design is of course essential for products with high reliability. However, no matter how good the product design is, products deteriorate over time since they are operating under certain stress or load in the real environment, often involving randomness. Maintenance has, thus, been introduced as an efficient way to assure a satisfactory level of reliability during the useful life of a physical asset. The earliest maintenance technique is basically breakdown maintenance (also called unplanned maintenance, or run-to-failure maintenance), which takes place only at breakdowns. A later maintenance technique is time-based preventive maintenance (also called planned maintenance), which sets a periodic interval to perform preventive maintenance regardless of the health status of a physical asset. The vehicle component is judged to be safe depending on its reliability.

Vehicle suspension along with tires and steering linkages is designed for safe vehicle control and to be free of irritating vibrations. Therefore the suspension system designs are a compromise between ride softness and handing ability. However, this work is concerned with a theoretical investigation into the ride behavior of actively suspended vehicles. It is based on using fuzzy logic control (FLC) to implement a new sort of active suspension system. Comparisons between the behavior of active suspension system with FLC with those obtained from active systems with linear control theory (LQR), ideal skyhook system and the conventional passive suspension systems. Results are introduced in such a way to predict the benefits that could be achieved from fuzzy logic system over other competing systems. Furthermore, a controller is designed and made by using results of FLC system, theoretical inputs are used to examine the validity of this controller.