Active Optimal Roll Control of Railway Vehicles in Curved Tracks Using an Electrically Actuated Anti-roll Bar System

Active tilting control is now one of the technologies utilized widely in high-speed railway vehicles. This paper tries to decrease the lateral acceleration on passengers (caused by high-speed motion in a curve) using an electrical anti-roll bar (ARB) that provides a limited amount of carbody tilt. A dynamic model is employed for a modern railway vehicle with its active anti-roll bar (AARB). Moreover, an attempt is made to design three control approaches of Kalman filter-based Model Predictive Control, Linear Quadratic Gaussian servo control, and proportional-integral regulator in such a way to be robust against noise and simultaneously improve ride comfort and vehicle dynamic performance. The active anti-roll bar acts as an actuator with a brushless DC (BLDC) motor, permitting active tilt control. Finally, the performance of the tilting vehicle and electric actuation system employing different control structures is assessed based on numerical simulations. Furthermore, a helpful comparison is drawn between the optimal and other simulated control approaches concerning ride comfort. The simulation results reveal better competency of Kalman filter-based Model Predictive Control in achieving the reference pursuit plus noise canceling and improving ride comfort.