Reduction of vertical vibration of railway vehicle with high-damping elastic support of underfloor equipment

Abstract

This paper presents a method for reducing vertical vibrations in a railway vehicle carbody by supporting underfloor equipment using high-damping elastic mounts. This is a kind of dynamic vibration absorber utilizing underfloor equipment as a mass element which has been introduced based on the inspiration of the damping effect of passengers. Numerical studies were firstly carried out to check the feasibility of the idea using simple two degree of freedom model representing carbody and underfloor equipment. Then a prototype of the elastic supporting member was built as a simple rubber mount and two type of excitation tests were conducted using a Shinkansen type test vehicle. The authors conducted excitation tests in the rolling stock testing plant to examine the carbody vibration reduction effect due to track irregularity. As a result, two dominant peaks in the acceleration power spectrum densities of floor corresponding to different elastic vibration modes were reduced simultaneously when the proposed method was applied. The vibration reduction effect became large as the elastically supported mass of underfloor increased. Then, to examine the vibration isolation performance of the developed rubber mount, excitation tests were conducted by a vibration exciter installed on the underfloor equipment. From the random wave excitation, the authors confirmed that the vertical vibration of carbody floor is reduced over a wide frequency band.

Keywords

• railway
• railway vehicle
• vertical vibration
• dynamic vibration absorber
• vibration reduction
• ride comfort
• vibration isolation