The Development of Stiffness-Adjustable Anti-yaw Damper

Abstract

It has been known that the high speed passenger car is likely subjected to the carbody hunting and the bogie instability owing to the different wheel/rail conditions. Carbody hunting always be occurred in low wheel/rail conicity after wheel re-profiling procedure and the bogie hunting can be occurred in the increased wheel/rail conicity in the service. These could impose highly adverse influence on the ride comfort of passengers and wheel/rail safety. A stiffness-adjustable anti-yaw damper integrating a FSS (Frequency Selective Stiffness) valve has thus been developed to enhance the adaptive of vehicle to both the low and high wheel/rail conicity service conditions. The damper laboratory test is undertaken to obtain its characteristic curve, which is further used in the vehicle dynamic model to investigate the influences of stiffness-adjustable anti-yaw damper. To better characterize the influence of the stiffness-adjustable anti-yaw damper, a roller rig test is further performed to compare the FSS yaw damper with other two conventional yaw dampers. The numerical and experimental results suggested that the FSS damper can achieve better adaptive to both low and high wheel/rail conicity with respect to other two conventional yaw dampers. In the low frequency range, the FSS yaw damper can yield relatively low stiffness so as to suppress the car body hunting for the low wheel/rail conicity condition, while it can also provide high stiffness in the high frequency range to improve the bogie stability for the high wheel/rail conicity condition.