Self-Powered Active Lateral Secondary Suspension for Railway Vehicles

This paper presents a design methodology for the development of self-powered active lateral secondary suspensions for rail vehicles. It first investigates the energy flow in the active lateral secondary suspensions and analyzes the conditions for self-powered control in detail. The impact of the controller design on both ride quality and energy consumption is then used to guide the design/specification of actuators and to define key actuator parameters to achieve both expected performance improvement and zero-energy consumption for the actuators. Furthermore, a control strategy for dealing with larger-than-expected energy consumption by the active suspensions is proposed not only to eliminate excessive power requirements but to ensure ride quality improvement, in comparison to that by passive suspensions, as well. Computer simulations are used to validate the control strategy for the self-powered active suspension.