Development of a new mounting structure of yaw damper to reduce railway carbody vibration

Abstract

It is pointed out that the yaw dampers, which are often installed in between carbody and bogie frame of a high-speed railway vehicle, have such unfavorable points that the damping force is generated not only in the yawing direction but also in other direction. As a result the damping force is generated also to the longitudinal or pitching vibration of a bogie, and the excitation force acts in the longitudinal direction of the carbody resulting in the increase of the carbody vibration of the longitudinal or vertical direction. In this research, to enable the reduction of the excitation of the carbody vibration while maintaining the original function of yaw dampers to prevent bogie hunting motion, a new mounting structure of yaw dampers on railway vehicles has been developed. The new mounting structure enables to reduce the excitation force transmitted from a bogie frame to a carbody through yaw dampers. In this paper, the effect of yaw dampers on the carbody vertical vibration is firstly shown based on the results of an excitation test of a full-scale vehicle, then the outline of the new mounting structure for yaw dampers and the design and manufacture of the prototype device are presented. The vehicle dynamics model based on multi body dynamics was constructed and the suppression effect of the yaw damper force generated to movement in the direction other than the yawing direction of a bogie was verified by the numerical simulation. Moreover, the prototype device was installed on a full-scale test vehicle and a bogie hunting motion test was carried out to verify the running stability.

Keywords

• railway
• yaw damper
• carbody vibration
• vehicle dynamics simulation
• bogie hunting