Semi-active control of primary suspensions to improve ride quality in a high-speed railway vehicle

Semi-active suspensions are seen as a promising technology to improve ride quality in high-speed railway vehicles as they provide substantial benefits not achievable through an optimisation of the passive suspension while avoiding some drawbacks of full-active control. Previous works showed that semi-active primary suspensions (SAPS) offer significant improvement of ride quality. However, published implementations of this concept did not consider the coupling effects between car-body and bogie vibrations, which play a decisive role in the success of control strategies for SAPS. This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of SAPS to improve vehicle ride comfort, with special attention to the mitigation of car-body bending vibration. A vehicle model considering the coupling of car-body bending and bogie pitch is proposed and used for the synthesis of an LQG controller. The performance of the semi-active suspension and controller is assessed using a detailed flexible multibody system of a high-speed vehicle. The proposed control scheme is shown to be highly effective in reducing car-body vibration in the entire frequency range of interest from 1 Hz to20Hz. A remarkable ride comfort improvement is found in the entire speed range from 150 km/h to 350 km/h.