Suppression of railway vehicle vibration by shunt damping using stack type piezoelectric transducers

In recent years, railway vehicles have become lighter, corresponding to improvement in the running speed. However, this causes the deterioration of the body rigidity, and leads to the increase in a vertical bending vibration of the body, because the natural frequency of the first bending vibration overlaps with a human's uncomfortable and sensitive frequency band. Many vibration suppression strategies have been proposed, i.e. a method to conduct active control for the secondary suspension system between the body and bogie, and a method to attach visco-elastic layers and constraint layers on the outside sheeting of the car body. In this paper, new control methods by shunt damping using stack type piezoelectric devices are proposed and the effectiveness and the robustness of designed circuits were confirmed through 1/6 scale model experiments.