15th Triennial World Congress of the International Federation of Automatic Control
  Barcelona, 21–26 July 2002 
COMFORT IMPROVEMENT OF AGRICULTURAL VEHICLES BY PASSIVE AND SEMI-ACTIVE SUSPENSIONS
K Deprez* D Moshou* H Ramon* J De Baerdemaeker*
* K.U. Leuven, Laboratory for Agro-Machinery and Processing,
Kasteelpark Arenberg 30, B-3001 Leuven, Belgium,
Tel.: +32 16 321478, Fax.: +32 16 321994,
email: koen.deprez@agr.kuleuven.ac.be

Growing awareness that uncomfortable agricultural vehicles endanger the health of the operators and stricter norms concerning this, make the design of an effective cabin suspension inevitable on agricultural vehicles. The comfort problem originates from the vibrations transmitted to the driver caused by the unevenness of the road or soil profile. This paper investigates the effect a passive and semi-active cabin suspension has on the comfort of the drivers. By optimizing the parameters of the passive suspension and those of the semi-active control laws, satisfactory improvement of the comfort can be achieved.
Keywords: vehicle suspension, optimization, passive, semi-active
Session slot T-Mo-A19: IT Based System Control in Agricultural Automation/Area code 4b : Intelligent Control in Agricultural Automation