Modal controllers for active steering of railway vehicles with solid axle wheelsets

This paper presents the development of a modal control strategy for the act ive steering of solid axle railway vehicles and reveals benefits of activel y stabilising the wheelsets of a railway vehicle. A modal decomposition is applied to a 2-axle railway vehicle to de-couple its body lateral and yaw m otions and hence to allow more detailed analysis of the vehicle behaviour a nd more robust design of active controllers. Independent controllers for th e two motions are developed based on the two de-coupled modes. Parameter va riations such as creep coefficients and wheelset conicity are taken into ac count in the design process to guarantee a robust design. The study shows t hat, compared to a passive vehicle, the vehicles with actively steered whee lsets not only perform much better on a curved track, but also improve the ride quality on straight track. Computer simulations are used in the study to verify the development of the controllers and assess the system performa nce with the control scheme proposed.