Abstract:To improve ride comfort in railway vehicles, the suppression of vertical bending vibration and rigid-body-mode vibration in the car body is essential. In this paper, a system is proposed that aims to reduce bending and rigid-body-mode vibration simultaneously by introducing damping control devices in the primary and secondary suspensions. The technique involves a control system of primary vertical dampers and air springs; the former are used to suppress the first bending mode vibration; the latter, to suppress the rigid-body-mode vibration. The results of both simulations and vehicle running tests on the Sanyo-Shinkansen line demonstrate that this system reduced vertical vibrations in the bogies and the car body using the sky-hook control theory. In the running tests in particular, the system reduced the vertical vibration acceleration PSD peak value in the first bending mode to almost 20 per cent and in the rigid body mode to almost 50 per cent compared with the case when the system was not used. As a result, the ride quality level L T (a widely used index of ride comfort in Japan) decreased by at least 3 dB, indicating greater ride comfort.
To improve the riding comfort of railway vehicles equipped with the air suspension system now in widespread use, we tested a semi-active air suspension control system with a variable orifice. The system is installed between the air spring and the auxiliary air chamber, and is adjusted using a controller with a design based on the H ∞ control algorithm. We carried out numerical simulations using a half railway vehicle model with a 4-element air suspension model, as well as performing excitation tests using a half carbody at a rolling stock test plant. The results show that the proposed system effectively reduces the power spectral density (PSD) of acceleration of the carbody floor. Additionally, little difference was observed between the vibration mitigation effectiveness of a reduced-order controller and that of the original one.
Suppression of the vertical bending vibration of carbodies has recently become essential in improving the riding comfort of railway vehicles. In many cases, the resonant frequency of the system (consisting of a bogie frame and axle springs) is close to that of the first mode bending vibration of the carbody, so suppressing the vibration of bogie frames near their resonant frequency effectively reduces carbody vibration. In this paper, we propose a method of suppressing such vibration by controlling the damping force of axle dampers installed between bogie frames and wheel sets. The design of the semi-active controller applied to determine the optimal damping force is based on the sky hook control theory. Numerical simulations using a vehicle model with 16 degrees of freedom as well as excitation tests using a carbody with variable axle dampers at a rolling stock test plant were carried out. The results show that this control method effectively reduces the power spectral density (PSD) of acceleration on the floor and that the riding comfort level (L T) can be improved by about 3 dB.
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