Hunting stability test for railway vehicles by hardware-in-the-loop simulation with actual yaw damper (development and qualitative verification of test equipment)

Hunting stability is one of the most essential characteristics of high speed trains, and it has been investigated by roller rig testing at a testing bench and numerical simulation. Those ways have their own drawbacks in their accuracy, cost and flexibility. We propose a new approach, Hardware-In-the-Loop Simulation (HILS), to test hunting stability of railway vehicles. HILS is a kind of simulation that uses some actual devices, and it enables us to increase simulation accuracy, keeping its cost-effectiveness and flexibility high. In this paper, we demonstrated hunting stability tests by HILS, which showed that the tests worked properly. Furthermore, we also exhibited how excitation device responsiveness affects quantitative analysis of hunting stability through simulation studies. © 2013 The Japan Society of Mechanical Engineers.