Shaw J., Pan R.

This paper presents design and control of a developed ER engine mount. An engine mount is mainly used to support an engine and prevents its excessive movements. In addition, it reduces engine excitation force transmitted to vehicle frame and absorbs road-induced vehicle vibrations when properly tuned. A flow mode type ER engine mount is first design and constructed for experiment. A semi-active control methodology is then derived for properly tuning the ER mount for vibration suppression. The semi-active control methodology mainly consists of two parts. First part is to acquire an inverse model of the developed ER engine mount using a neural network. The inverse model of neural network can produce the needed electric field intensity for semi-active control of the ER mount by knowing the field-dependent damping force. A recurrent fuzzy network is used for the inverse model. The second part of the control methodology is to apply an adaptive sliding control scheme for computing the field-dependent damping force for vibration suppression. The field-dependent displacement and acceleration transmissibilities of the ER mount are evaluated in the frequency domain. In addition, controlled responses of the proposed ER engine mount associated with a skyhook controller are investigated and compared with those developed in this paper.