A semi-active control suspension system for railway vehicles with magnetorheological fluid dampers

ABSTRACT

The high-speed train has achieved great progress in the last decades. It is one of the most important modes of transportation between cities. With the rapid development of the high-speed train, its safety issue is paid much more attention than ever before. To improve the stability of the vehicle with high speed, extra dampers (i.e. anti-hunting damper) are used in the traditional bogies with passive suspension system. However, the curving performance of the vehicle is undermined due to the extra lateral force generated by the dampers. The active suspension systems proposed in the last decades attempt to solve the vehicle steering issue. However, the active suspension systems need extra actuators driven by electrical power or hydraulic power. There are some implementation and even safety issues which are not easy to be overcome. In this paper, an innovative semi-active controlled lateral suspension system for railway vehicles is proposed. Four magnetorheological fluid dampers are fixed to the primary suspension system of each bogie. They are controlled by online controllers for enhancing the running stability on the straight track line on the one hand and further improving the curving performance by controlling the damper force on the other hand. Two control strategies are proposed in the light of the pure rolling concept. The effectiveness of the proposed strategies is demonstrated by SIMPACK and Matlab co-simulation for a full railway vehicle with two conventional bogies.

KEYWORDS:

• Vehicle suspension system
• semi-active control
• MR damper
• curving performance
• stability

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Author note

Acknowledgments

Some discussions and suggestions from Professor T. X. Mei, Salford University, should be acknowledged. This work is partly supported by the State Key Laboratory of Rail Traffic Control and Safety (Contract No. RCS2014ZT03), Beijing Jiaotong University. The authors are also grateful to the anonymous reviewers for helpful questions and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).