Design Methodology and Experimental Results of a Test Facility for Active and Conventional Railway Suspensions

The authors form part of a work team engaged on a four year project on the application of active suspensions to railway vehicles. The objective of the first stage of the project was the construction of a test facility on which to experiment the various suspension systems. Criteria used to design this facility were formulated using reduced scale models and mixed theoretical-experimental techniques. This strategy has considerably reduced the cost of the project without neglecting consideration of wheel-to-rail contact phenomena and interactions between primary and secondary suspensions. Special attention has been paid to the comparison between results obtained on the facility and results previously checked with on-field measurements. This paper also includes a description of the control system and of the actuators and sensors used.