A REVIEW OF PROGRESS IN THE APPLICATION OF ACTIVE SUSPENSION

TECHNOLOGY TO RAILWAY VEHICLES

A H Wickens

Introduction The concept of active suspension systems for vehicles guided along a track
is far from new, and much successful theoretical and experimental work has been carried
out. In contrast, the practical application of active systems has been limited. This is
probably owing to perceived weaknesses of the technology in the intensive service
environment typical of railway operations and difficulty in converting technical advantages
into commercial gain. However, recent advances in microelectronics, digital control,
actuator and sensor design and computer modelling make it possible to develop much
improved and more effective active controls. At the same time commercial and political
pressures on railways to be more competitive and cost-effective are driving the need for
improved technology. These trends are combining to provide a major potential opportunity
for the application of active suspensions to railway vehicles. It is the purpose of this paper
to review progress in this respect particularly concentrating on those applications where it
seems that economic and technological criteria might be congruent.
wension Requirements For a railway vehicle the suspension system must support the
weight of the vehicle, isolate passengers and freight from irregularities in track geometry
and from aerodynamic forces, guide the vehicle so that it follows the track, limit motions of
the vehicle to within the structural clearance gauge and minimise the forces applied to both
vehicle and track. It follows that there are a number of quite basic conflicts in these
requirements. For example, in the vertical direction a low natural frequency of the car
body on the suspension is desirable to achieve a low acceleration level but leads to large
static deflections. In the lateral plane guidance is achieved by the use of flanged
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wheelsets with coned wheel treads good curving requires that the wheelset take up a
radial position on a curve in order to minimise the deviation from rolling but the suspension
requirements for this foster dynamic instability. In a railway vehicle motions in both vertical
and lateral planes are equally important. The many conflicting requirements suggest that
the use of active suspensions would enable some of these to be relaxed thus leading to
improved performance.
Active Sec0ndarv SusDensions In order to improve ride quality most previous work has
concentrated on-suspension elements between the bogie and the car body. Perhaps the
most significant work was that carried out by British Rail in the 1970’s and 1980’s.
Theoretical and experimental examination of a number of alternative schemes for both
vertical and lateral suspensions culminated in service trials of a passenger coach with an
active vertical? suspension. It was demonstrated that reductions in rms acceleration level
of up to 50% could be achieved with practical systems. There are various ways in which
this could be exploited (a) more revenue could be generated by offering better ride quality
- but this in isolation is difficult to quantify particularly when ride quality is already good (b)
for the same speed and ride quality track smoothness criteria could be relaxed thus
reducing track maintenance costs - but this may not be acceptable to other vehicles on a
mixed traffic railway (c) higher speeds could be achieved on the same quality of track - but
speed is not usually limited by track roughness but by track curvature. It is therefore
suggested that the reasons why such systems have not been adopted lies in the problem
of quantifying and securing the benefits. Securing the benefits from lower track costs
requires railways to be not only very cost-effective and cost-conscious but to have
considerable sophistication of management capable of identifying and acting upon trade-
offs between track and vehicles. Thus progress in implementing active suspensions is

Department of Mechanical Engineering, Loughborough University of Technology

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likely to go hand in hand with a greater emphasis on systems engineering in general.
What has not yet been considered is the potential contribution of active suspension
systems to improvements in train design. For example, it will be necessary for future train
designs to be much more energy efficient, and this in turn will require reductions in train
mass. Active suspensions could make it possible to reduce vehicle mass without
degrading ride quality.
Tilt Svstems The opportunity to reduce journey times by increasing speed in curves has
stimulated the application of active suspensions in the form of tilt systems, which are now
well established in railway technology. It was recognised from the 1930’s onwards that
owing to the high roll centre on conventional passenger cars the car body tilted outwards
on the secondary suspension thus causing additional discomfort in curves. This led to a
number of developments in which passive tilting was applied by ensuring that roll centres
were below the centre of mass of the car body. However, in general the response time of
the roll suspension was too long and the degree of tilting restricted by clearance gauge
limitations. In the late 1960’s a number of developments were initiated in which the tilting
was powered - in other words active tilting systems. Of these the FIAT Pendolino and the
ASEA X2 designs have survived a lengthy development period to find application in
commercial service.
The original idea for an active tilting system was that the resultant lateral acceleration on
the car body was measured and used to drive an actuator in an independent dosed loop
system on each vehicle in a train. It was found that this form of system coupled strongly
with the lateral motions of the vehicle and was prone to instability and so current systems
are open-loop. Such an open-loop tilt system can be driven by track data (curvature and
cant) supplied by either an on-board data-base or by track mounted transponders or by an
accelerometer mounted on a non-tilting part of the train. The latter has usually been the
chosen alternative. The accelerometer output requires filtering to minimise the
transmission of track irregularities to the car body and to minimise power consumption.
The resulting phase lag is counteracted by some form of preview to ensure that tilting
occurs on curve entry. In the case of the Pendolino, entry into the curve is detected by a
gyroscope and on the X2 the accelerometer is mounted on the leading bogie of the train,
with appropriate delays for each car in the train. On the X2 additional signals are derived
from the difference between the angle between the tilting bolsters on different cars.
It has been found that optimum passenger comfort is obtained with 70% compensation of
cant deficiency, and that the roll rate should not exceed about 3 degreeskec. Maximum
tilt angles are up to 10 degrees. Reliability is of course vital and the target set for the X2 is
1 failure in 380,000 km or one year.
Typically, the cost of a tilting system is 10-20% of the vehicle cost and of course it adds
weight and complexity. But the use of tilt leads to journey time savings of around 20-30%
which are sufficiently commercially valuable that a number of tilting trains have now
entered service. For example, the X2 has now been in service with SJ since 1990 and the
Pendolino has carried over 2 million passengers having been in service since 1989. The
Pendolino technology has been applied to trains now being put into service by DB and
other applications are likely.
Actively controlled suspensions act within a
vehicle by applying forces between components. Active steering as exemplified by recent
developments in the automotive field still requires a human steering input to the front
wheels. In active guidance resultant forces are generated by which to alter the path in
space as a result of absolute position. The spectrum of transport systems can be
considered in terms of speed and track curvature. At the high speed end of the spectrum
the conventional railway wheelset is a successful guidance device well adapted to its
application but as track curvature increases the technical challenge of better curving
performance has resulted in many solutions and innovations culminating in the extreme
manoeuvrability sought for the mobile robot. Generally, there have been some practical

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technical achievements such as the development of buses guided with respect to a buried
leader wire, the use of automatically guided vehicles in warehousing, and a substantial
amount of laboratory work on mobile robots but in the conventional railway field work is in
its infancy. A significant development is that of an actively steered wheelset by INRETS-
LTN in which t h e wheelset is steered by the yaw moment generated by electro-magnets
which react against a guide rail the gap being controlled by a gap sensor. This has been
demonstrated at low speeds on a two-axle vehicle. A further step would be to dispense
with the axles and to use independent wheels controlled in response to measurements of
absolute displacement. A full implementation of mechatronic principles to such a bogie
would involve application of electronics to the control of traction and braking as well as
suspension in an integrated way.
MAGLEV The ultimate form of active suspension for tracked vehicles exists in the form
of magnetically levitated and propelled vehicles. Much development work has been done
in Japan and Germany on high speed systems over t h e last twenty years, but application
has been hindered by the need for completely new infrastructure. Moreover the
conventional railway has caught up in terms of speed. At low speeds the system at
Birmingham airport h a s been in service for 8 years and has demonstrated outstandingly
high reliability and availability. Whilst t h i s is the only system in the world in regular
passenger service, it is quite possible that magnetic levitation techniques are at the foot of
a learning curve which with the injection of new technologies could be quite steep and
which could lead to outstanding advantages in the future.
Conclusions Active suspension technology will be applied in the railway field provided that
there are tangible commercial benefits, as h a s been demonstrated by exploitation of tilting
trains. It is likely that some benefits of active suspensions can only be realised if railways
adopt a systems approach to both operations and train design. A mechatronic approach
to bogie design integrating all electronic sub-systems could bring great advantages
including effective exploitation of active suspensions.

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