MIMO Vibration Control for a Flexible Rail Car Body: Design and Experimental Validation

Combined active suspension and structural damping control for suppression of flexible bodied railway vehicle vibration

“…The free-free beam approximation of the flexural vibration of the vehicle body takes into account only the first two vertical bending modes. The effects of the diagonal distortion mode and torsional mode, which are in the frequency range of human sensitivity, and localised high-frequency deformation caused by structure actuation [13,11], are neglected. Moreover, measurement tests of the actual railway vehicles show the complicated the roof and floor in-phase and anti-phase bending modes [24] and the simulation of a virtual vehicle system shows additional mode shapes due to the elastically mounted equipments [25].…”

“…Frequency-weighted H 2 control is adopted because H 2 control is considered particularly suited for vibration control problems in which the system is subjected to disturbances of broadband or of known spectral content, and the H 2 norm is a more natural measurement of performance in treatment of disturbances [31]. Moreover, we are able to use the dynamic weighting functions to shape the controller actions within the specific target frequency ranges so as to have minimum influence on modes of other frequencies [13]. Hence the controller is expected to be less sensitive to model uncertainties.…”

“…Active structural damping with piezoelectric actuators was applied by Kamada et al [9], and independent H ∞ controllers were designed to suppress the first three flexible modes. Stack actuators mounted in consoles to introduce force/moment pairs to the structure have been proved effective for active damping of the large structure of railway vehicles [10,11,12,13]. Schirrer et al [13] studied the LQG and frequency-weighted H 2 control methods for vibration control of lightweight rail car body structure with piezo stack actuators, whose performances are compared with different sensor concepts.…”

“…Stack actuators mounted in consoles to introduce force/moment pairs to the structure have been proved effective for active damping of the large structure of railway vehicles [10,11,12,13]. Schirrer et al [13] studied the LQG and frequency-weighted H 2 control methods for vibration control of lightweight rail car body structure with piezo stack actuators, whose performances are compared with different sensor concepts. Schandl et al [12] designed state feedback controllers by pole placement with state estimator using piezoelectric stack actuators together with collocated sensor patches for active damping of the vehicle structure.…”

Study on Improving the Ride Comfort in Railway Vehicles Using Anti-Bending Dampers

“…More concepts regarding the reduction of the carbody structural vibrations and enhancement of the ride comfort have already been introduced. They can be classified into two complementary approaches: vibration isolation approaches, which include passive, semi-active and active concepts and play the role to stop excitation propagation through the suspension and structural damping approaches (active or passive), aiming to reduce the carbody structure vibration amplitudes [7].…”