Towards the realization of an innovative rail vehicle — active ride comfort control

Abstract

The Shift2Rail project Pivot2 introduces an innovative metro vehicle with two single axle running gears with only one suspension step to reduce the vehicle’s weight. A U-shaped connection frame is designed in Carbon Fibre Reinforced Polymer to further reduce weight and incorporate the anti-roll bar. Due to the poor ride comfort of the vehicle with standard passive dampers, all six dampers are replaced by hydraulic actuators. Modal control is applied and optimized with genetic algorithms. Despite the good improvements obtained, the weighted vertical acceleration remains above the acceptance level. Two modifications of modal control are studied, i.e., modal control with additional sensor, and blended control. Based on the frequency response of the results, it is proposed a low-pass filtered blended controller to neglect frame accelerations high frequency content. This last improves vertical comfort at the expenses of a more complex control system in comparison to modal control.