THE DYNAMICS IMPROVEMENT OF RAILWAY BOGIE VEHICLES BY A RE-CONFIGURABLE MECHANISM

Abstract

To solve the fundamental conflicts between lateral tangent track stability and curve negotiation in conventional bogie vehicles and between conventional stability and steering instability in bogie vehicles capable of perfect steering, a re-configurable mechanism is proposed. A bogie vehicle can be the perfect steering configuration on curves or only on sharp curves and be the conventional configuration in other environments when the re-configurable mechanism is applied. The dynamic behaviour of two bogie vehicles with the re-configurable mechanism is studied with regard to their stability, curving and ride quality. The results show that this class of bogie vehicle can well decouple these conflicts and is very useful implementations for raising the operation speed for existing railways. Since the re-configurable mechanism is effectively an independent system, it can be much simpler, less energy consuming and more reliable than active suspension systems.