It is well known that the vibration control problem for automobiles and railway vehicles with semi-active suspensions is classified as a control problem in a bilinear system. Bullet trains and railway vehicles have lighter body in order to improve acceleration; these vibrations in the body are easily induced by various disturbances due to rigid and elastic dynamics. Currently, passive dampers such as air suspensions and axle springs are installed on railway vehicle trucks as countermeasures for such vibrations. This study presents an effective controller, based on the H ∞ theory, for vibration suppression in railway vehicles and describes a method of synthesizing this robust controller by considering unstructured and structured uncertainties that are applicable to a bilinear system. The performance of the proposed controller and its robustness toward uncertainties are examined by numerical calculations that simulate a railway vehicle subjected to disturbances due to vertical uneven railway tracks, the variations in its mass due to boarding passengers, and the modeling errors caused by non-controlled modes. This enables a comparison of the proposed control method with the conventional one in terms of the robustness toward parameter variation. Thus, this result shows the high robustness and usefulness of the proposed controller.

Highlights• A new method to predict response bounds is applied to friction-damped systems.• The approach applies to parametric and model uncertainty associated with friction.• Bounds can be computed at similar computational cost to a single HBM simulation.• Results are compared with an eight-blade idealised laboratory test rig.• Comparisons with numerical and experimental Monte Carlo tests show good agreement.

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