A new method for improving riding comfort by reducing vertical flexural vibrations in railway car bodies using piezoelectric elements is studied in this paper. Piezoelectric elements are attached on the car body in order to convert vibration energy to electrical energy, which can be dissipated in a shunt circuit. Assuming the car body as an elastically supported Bernoulli-Euler beam, theoretical analysis and numerical simulations are carried out. The numerical results are supplemented by experiments on a 1:5 scale model of a Shinkansen vehicle. Both numerical and experimental results indicate that the method yields significant vibration suppression with only a small amount of added weight. Two types of shunt circuits; a single-mode circuit and a multi-mode circuit are studied.
Piezoelectric elements, which are electrically connected to external shunt circuits, are introduced to suppress bending vibration of a scale model of a railway vehicle. The authors proposed two types of shunt circuits aiming at practical use. One circuit is equivalent to an inductor and a resistor in series, and the other a negative capacitor and a resistor, and both circuits are designed for use under conditions of large vibration amplitude that causes high voltage generated by the elements. Results of excitation tests show that the first bending mode of the scale model can be suppressed successfully. Moreover, the circuit including the negative capacitor can also reduce vibration associated with higher eigen modes simultaneously with the first mode.
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