An Active Suspension System Design for the Lateral Dynamics of a High-Speed Wheel-Rail System

Railroad cars are known to exhibit instabilities in the lateral dynamics at high speeds. To solve some of the problems of stability, an active suspension system is studied for the high-speed rail vehicle and is compared with the passive system. The vehicle control problem is formulated as an optimization problem with an integral quadratic cost function, and the feedback law thus obtained is further simplified. For the case of the truck dynamics, with external controllers, a Lyapunov function approach is taken for considering state constraints. Stability regions are obtained by analog computer simulation.