H2 Controller Design for Flexible and Rigid Bodied Railway Vehicles

In this paper, a six degrees-of freedom half-car model for a high-speed railway train is used to study the flexible and rigid car body dynamics under the presence of random track irregularities. A robust controller design to optimize the vertical ride quality is assessed by reducing the H2norms of the wheel-rail forces while reducing the flexible vibrations in the carbody so as to improve the ride comfort of the railway vehicle. The random vibration responses of the coupled vehicletrack model based on simulation studies in MATLAB software, showed that the structural coupling can be obstructed by attenuating the vibrations of both the flexible modes and rigid modes which are suppressed effectively by the active suspension design.