Improving Ride Comfort and Trackwear of Two-Axle Railway Vehicles Using Inerter-Based Lateral Suspension Layouts

This paper investigates the use of passive, inerter based lateral suspension networks in two-axle railway vehicles with the aim of concurrently improving ride comfort under straight running conditions and reducing trackwear under curving conditions. It is found that employing optimised networks which include single parallel inerters can reduce the carbody acceleration by up to 43% when the vehicle is travelling over a rough track modelled either from real or random track data. T Gamma is then used to quantify the frictional energy lost at the contact patch and it is found that simultaneously incorporating single parallel inerters into the lateral suspension networks and reducing the vehicle’s yaw stiffness reduces trackwear and improves ride comfort. Look-up plots of optimised suspension elements for differing values of yaw stiffness are produced, with the series inerter requiring a much higher inertance than the parallel inerter when considering the most beneficial structure.