VISKY: Virtual Inertia Skyhook Control for Semi-Active Suspension Systems Using Magnetorheological Dampers

Abstract

This paper presents a Virtual Inertia Skyhook (VISKY) controller for magnetorheological (MR) dampers in semi-active suspensions. The proposed law is derived from a continuous sky-ground damping baseline augmented with acceleration feedback on the sprung and unsprung masses. In the closed-loop equations, these acceleration terms appear as a mass-like virtual inertia matrix rather than as a change in physical hardware. This interpretation motivates the VISKY name while making the underlying sky-ground hybrid structure explicit. Numerical evaluations under half-sine bump, representative ISO 8608 random-road and while-acceleration metrics relative to conventional Skygroundhook, with the largest gains appearing near the wheel-hop mode. The controller retains low computational overhead because it requires only algebraic force computation and bounded MR inversion.