Semi-active suspension systems have emerged as an attractive alternative to fully active suspensions because they offer a superior capacity to improve vehicle ride comfort and handling performance with significantly lower energy consumption. Conventional semi-active control strategies, however, such as skyhook damping, often cannot accommodate the nonlinear and time-varying dynamics of vehicles in operation under impulse or severe road disturbances. In this context, an intelligent smart-damper controller is proposed in this paper by incorporating a Modified Fuzzy Adaptive Fuzzy Logic Control framework in a half-car suspension model. In the developed controller, the effective damping force is adaptively tuned using real-time measurements of body acceleration and velocity to achieve enhanced dynamic robustness. The research contribution is the development of an adaptive, computationally efficient semi-active control law that is capable of achieving superior performance over conventional skyhook damping in the case of highly transient excitations. For this purpose, a comprehensive simulation study has been carried out to evaluate the passive, skyhook, and MFAFLC suspensions for identical Gaussian impulse road profiles. The MFAFLC system results in substantial improvements over passive suspension by reducing peak body displacement by 48.6%, pitch angle by 42.1%, and vertical acceleration by 55.7%, while reducing settling times by 35–50%. MFAFLC thus offers a further improvement of 12–25% over skyhook control for most performance indices. These results illustrate that MFAFLC-based smart damping promises to be a more adaptive and effective solution for semi-active vibration control in vehicles subjected to unpredictable road disturbances.
