Numerical study of the inuence of suspended equipment on ride comfort in high-speed railway vehicles

Abstract

To study how the suspended equipment affects the car body exible vibrations in a high-speed railway vehicle and the ride comfort, a rigid exible general model of such vehicles is required. The numerical simulations of this study relied on three distinct models derived from the general model of the vehicle, namely a reference model with no equipment, a simplified model with one piece of equipment mounted at the car body centre, and a model with four pieces of equipment mounted in various positions along the car body. This paper is intended to fill the gap in the literature, which does not feature any study to highlight the change in the comfort, exclusively due to the equipment. Neither is there any mentioning of the contrast between the results for ride comfort obtained by the simplified model and by the models with more pieces of equipment. The characteristics of the car body exible vibration with suspended equipment were assessed by comparing the frequency response functions between the no-equipment and one-piece-of-equipment models. The inuence of the suspended equipment on the ride comfort was established by comparing the ride comfort indices calculated by one- and four-pieces-of-equipment models with the same index for the no-equipment model.