Abstract
Road-rail vehicles built on traditional vehicle chassis can only switch operation modes at particular areas such as level crossings, thus limiting the working scope and efficiency of routine railway inspection and maintenance. This paper proposes a novel tracked chassis for the road-rail vehicle with a multi-cylinder hydropneumatic suspension system, which can better adapt to rough terrains and enhance the vehicle ride performance. Based on this hydropneumatic suspension design, the single-cylinder mathematical model is derived and validated by experimental data. An in-plane multi-body dynamics (MBD) model and road model are established, combined with the hydropneumatic suspension model, including the LuGre friction force. Virtual tests are conducted to investigate the effects of different initial gas volumes, varied diameters and damping pipe lengths on the ride performance. The results indicate that improper damping pipe diameter and charge gas volume will deteriorate the ride performance, which provides a useful reference for the optimization design and control of the hydropneumatic system.
Highlights
Differing from general vehicles operating on prepared roads, special vehicles equipped with tracked chassis are designed for negotiating harsh terrains
The crest factor (CF) value is defined as the relation between the peak amplitude of the signal to the root mean square (r.m.s.) value and offers a quick and accurate prediction of how much impact occurs during periods [27,28]
This paper has introduced a whole set of hydropneumatic suspension system design for the tracked chassis of a road-rail vehicle that has to adapt to rugged and uneven road surface beside the railway
Summary
Differing from general vehicles operating on prepared roads, special vehicles equipped with tracked chassis are designed for negotiating harsh terrains. The hydropneumatic suspension is widely used in offroad tracked vehicles, because of its good non-linear elastic stiffness and superior damping performance [1] and for the high-power density with lightweight With such good properties, the tracked vehicles can better handle the conflict between the ride comfort and handling stability than ordinary trailing arm suspension [2,3]. By connecting the hydropneumatic suspension and the spring in series, the grip can be increased while ensuring that the comfort level is basically unaltered These publications based on wheeled vehicles provide effective theoretical methods and models for the research of hydropneumatic suspension for tracked vehicles. Wong [10,11] and McCullough and Huang [12] systematically derived tracked vehicle dynamics models which considered the mobility over soft terrains, ride dynamics over rough surfaces and maneuverability.
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