Design of a new adaptive fuzzy controller and its implementation for the damping force control of a magnetorheological damper

This paper presents a new adaptive fuzzy controller and its implementation for the damping force control of a magnetorheological (MR) fluid damper in order to validate the effectiveness of the control performance. An interval type 2 fuzzy model is built, and then combined with modified adaptive control to achieve the desired damping force. In the formulation of the new adaptive controller, an enhanced iterative algorithm is integrated with the fuzzy model to decrease the time of calculation (D Wu 2013 IEEE Trans. Fuzzy Syst. 21 80–99) and the control algorithm is synthesized based on the tracking technique. In addition, for the verification of good control performance of the proposed controller, a cylindrical MR damper which can be applied to the vibration control of a washing machine is designed and manufactured. For the operating fluid, a recently developed plate-like particle-based MR fluid is used instead of a conventional MR fluid featuring spherical particles. To highlight the control performance of the proposed controller, two existing adaptive fuzzy control algorithms proposed by other researchers are adopted and altered for a comparative study. It is demonstrated from both simulation and experiment that the proposed new adaptive controller shows better performance of damping force control in terms of response time and tracking accuracy than the existing approaches.