Evaluation of Ride Comfort in a Railway Passenger Vehicle with Integrated Vehicle and Human Body Bond Graph Model

Ride comfort is the level of comfort sensed by the passengers when they are continuously exposed to the vibration and noise. To diminish the vibration level, air springs are used in the secondary suspension system instead of coil springs, especially in the modern railway vehicles. This article focuses on the modeling of Nishimura air spring with non-linear damper and human biodynamic (bio-mechanical) model by using multi energy domain modeling approach, bond graph. The car body of the railway vehicle is treated as a beam and the first five modes including three flexible modes are considered in the model. We use International Organization for Standardization 2631 for evaluating ride comfort for different durations of the travel time (1 h, 2.5 h, 4 h and 8 h) on flexible and irregular tracks.