Application of yaw dampers with frequency-selective damping to improve the locomotive adaptability to low/high conicity stability

Abstract

High-speed locomotives are prone to the carbody or bogie hunting under extreme wheel-rail contact conditions, which can cause negative impacts on vehicle dynamics performance. The influence of key suspension parameters on the carbody lateral ride comfort and bogie lateral acceleration is investigated by the multi-objective optimization and Sobol global sensitivity analysis methods, which is based on the Radial Basis Function Neutral Network surrogate model. The results illustrate that the yaw damper damping is sensitive to the two hunting stabilities, but conventional yaw dampers with fixed damping fail to satisfy both the stability demands simultaneously. Therefore, this paper presents a damping-adjustable yaw damper integrating an FSD (frequency-selective damping) valve to guarantee the lateral stability especially in abnormal wheel-rail contact states, and the application effects of the FSD yaw damper for the locomotive are researched by dynamics simulations. The results show that the FSD yaw damper can improve the adaptability of the locomotive to both the low and high wheel-rail contact conicity service conditions compared with the conventional yaw dampers.