Semiactive Control of High-Speed Railway Vehicle Suspension Systems with Magnetorheological Dampers

Abstract

Using the magnetorheological (MR) damper model, this paper derives a semiactive suspension model for a high-speed railway vehicle, and a new evaluating method is proposed to analyze the effect of two kinds of time delay existing in control systems on vehicle dynamic performance. The railway vehicle is modeled by a 50 degree-of-freedom (DOF) system which considers the full 6 DOF of each wheelset, bogie, car body, and the pitch angle of each axle box. Several control strategies, sky-hook (SH), acceleration-driven damping (ADD), and mixed SH-ADD, are considered in the semiactive suspension system. To evaluate the effect of these semiactive controls and the different kinds of time delay on the lateral ride index of a high-speed railway vehicle, a 3D surface in a rectangular coordinate system is described. The cross curve between the 3D surface and a horizontal plane which represents the performance of passive suspension is projected on the X-Y plane, and the area enclosed by the contour line, X-axis, and Y-axis can be used to evaluate the performance of semiactive controls. The results show that the new method is convenient to evaluate the performance of semiactive control strategies visually when there is more than one kind of time delay.