The benefits of the inerter in passive suspension have been well demonstrated. To investigate suspension performances with the inerter in semi-active suspension, eight well studied passive suspension configurations with a parallel connection to a variable shock absorber are analyzed in this paper. By applying the optimal control theory, an optimal solution for each configuration is obtained and numerically solved by the forward/backward sweep method. The result shows that under the considered performance measure, the use of inerter can improve ride comfort in general, where the effect can even be significant for some specific configurations, but has no obvious advantage in road holding and suspension travel performance compared with the conventional semi-active suspension. © 2012 Chinese Assoc of Automati.

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