A 3-Dimensional Dynamic Model of the Aerotrain and the Horizontal Tail Effect on the Longitudinal Stability

Abstract

The Aerotrain is a new generation train that floats at a low altitude along a U-shaped (concrete) guideway by the aerodynamic forces generated at the two levitation wings. Using the wing-in-ground effect, the Aerotrain can have an advantage in reducing the operating cost through its low-cost guideway while maintaining high-speed under high-payload compared with the conventional magnetically levitated train system which uses the magnetic levitation effect. By floating along a U-shaped guideway, at steady state, the movement in X direction is less important than the movement in Y and Z direction and the rotation about three axes, therefore it could be neglected. From this simplification, in this paper, the nonlinear 3-dimensional dynamic model of the Aerotrain based on the rigid body model has been developed in order to clarify the relationship between the body design and its stability. The dynamic model was applied to corroborate the effect of the horizontal tail on the longitudinal stability. Simulation results show that the presence of the horizontal tail greatly contributes to the longitudinal stability of the Aerotrain while its behavior of the Aerotrain without it results in divergence. In addition, the appropriate position of the horizontal tail was discussed after looking at the simulation results with different variations.