An Experimental Study of Assist Steering Bogie System for Railway Vehicle

In order to decrease the lateral force in the curve sections of the railway vehicles, a simple steering bogie system that was able to apply to the bolsterless bogie was designed. The mono-link with the actuator function is used, and adds an appropriate supplemental steering force to self-steering characteristic of the wheel-sets. The authors have designated this system as an "assist steering bogie system". The assist steering actuator becomes normally spring constant of longitudinal primary suspension that is used in usual mono-link suspension when the controller operation is not active, so this system does not affected to the bogie running stability. This system can be achieved more low-cost by using the controller without track information and position detective device. In this simple control system, assist steering force is mainly settled from the yawing angler velocity of car-body. In this paper, the assist steering system with such features is applied to a test bogie, and we report the result of basic running test in the yard of Railway Technical Research Institute premises. As a result, it is found out that the average lateral force in circular curve section is decreased about 30% compared with the state in which the assist steering control did not enforce. In addition, we confirmed the basically safety when the system steered inversed direction because of the controller failing.