Chaos in a railway bogie

Abstract

Railway bogies may perform sustained lateral oscillations — the hunting motion —when the speed reaches a certain value. We examine the hunting motion in the complex Cooperrider bogie and find that the wheel flanges have a strong influence on the behaviour. When the bogie has flangeless wheels we have found a symmetry breaking bifurcation, by which we mean, that there is a transition from a symmetric periodic oscillation to an asymmetric periodic oscillation. The periodic motions are examined using the residual map. When the bogie has flanged wheels (the flange is represented as a dead band spring), we do instead find chaotic behaviour confirmed by a positive Liapunov number. The dynamical equations for the bogie model are strongly nonlinear, and we use computer methods to examine the dynamical behaviour.