Lateral Active Pneumatic Suspensions for Rail Vehicle Ride Control

This paper investigates the pneumatic implementation of a lateral active suspension system for passenger rail vehicles. Included are an actuator bandwidth study on a high order linear model of rail vehicle lateral dynamics to which an active suspension was added, the modeling of a pneumatic actuator, and a nonlinear digital simulation of the pneumatic system on a single degree of freedom vehicle model. Consideration is given to vehicle vibration and secondary stroke reduction as well as to system size and power consumption.