Active Control of the Running Behaviour of a Railway Vehicle: Stability and Curving Performances

The paper deals with the application of active control to high speed trains. To this end, an innovative controlled electro-mechanical device was designed to substitute traditional yaw dampers currently in use. The main components of this system are a brushless motor, with gear and spindle, used to apply a longitudinal force between the carbody and the bogie, and a velocity transducer used to measure the yaw vibrations of the bogie. Different control strategies are developed for tangent track running, where the objective is to increase the critical speed, and for curve negotiation, where the goal is to reduce the maximum values of track shift forces. The paper also reports about the results of a mathematical model of the actively controlled vehicle. These results, together with those coming from line tests, show that the proposed active control strategy allows significant improvements in vehicle performances both in tangent track and in curve.