A robust active roll control system for improving roll stability of an articulated vehicle carrying liquid

In this paper, to improve the roll stability of an articulated vehicle carrying liquid an active roll control system using a robust nonlinear controller is presented. First, a sixteen-degree-of-freedom nonlinear dynamic model of an articulated vehicle is developed next using TruckSim software in a standard maneuver, the vehicle model is validated. Then, the dynamic interaction between the fluid cargo and the tractor semitrailer vehicle, by integrating a quasi-dynamic slosh model with sixteen-degree-of-freedom of a tractor semitrailer model is investigated. Also, for rollover prevention of an articulated vehicle carrying liquid, a novel nonlinear robust control including combination of sliding mode control and feedback linearization control is proposed. Control system performance for two different fill volumes in J-turn and lane change maneuvers is shown. Next, to investigate the rollover stability of an articulated heavy vehicle carrying liquid, load transfer ratio is considered as an important factor. Moreover, in order to study the performance of the robust control system, a linear controller has been used. The simulation results confirm the excellent performance of the proposed robust control system in critical lane change maneuver due to increase of longitudinal velocity and a reduction of road friction coefficient.