Vibration damping of a flexible car body structure using piezo-stack actuators

Active vibration damping of a railway car body is accomplished by actuator forces acting directly on the flexible car body structure. In this work piezo-stack actuators mounted in consoles are utilized to introduce bending moments into the flexible structure, thus achieving a significant increase in ride comfort. For a heavy metro vehicle the complete design of the active vibration damping system is presented. Analytic modeling, system identification, and robust controller design are presented. The excellent performance of the proposed method is documented by both extensive experimental results and co-simulation studies. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.