Advances on railway yaw damper characterisation exposed to small displacements

This paper focuses on the behaviour of a railway yaw damper when it is subjected to small displacements. These operating conditions occur on high-speed tracks where a high degree of infrastructure maintenance assures low excitation levels of the vehicle. The dynamic response of the typical spring/dashpot in-series model is compared with experimental results of a damper in a wide range of operating conditions. The correlation of the results shows the limitations of this conventional damper model, and some simple modifications are proposed. The variations introduced to produce a 'modified' damper model do not add complexity to the conventional model, but extend the operating range for which it has a good correlation with experimental results.