A New Coordination Control Strategy on Secondary Lateral Damper for High-Speed Trains

Background With the increasing speed of trains, the comprehensive dynamic performance is getting worse and worse. Purpose Therefore, how to ensure the comprehensive dynamic performance of the train, such as the ride comfort and safety, has increasingly become a research core of scholars. Method The dynamic model of a high-speed train based on nonlinear wheel rail contact is established using the Universal Mechanism (UM) software, and then a co-simulation model is further established by the UM and Matlab/simulink for all semi-active simulations. First, the continuous Sky-hook (SH) damping control is used to the train model for simulations. The simulation results show that the advantage of the continuous Sky-hook damping control is to improve the ride comfort. Second, for improving the safety, a safety control strategy is proposed in the paper and is applied to the secondary lateral damper for simulation analysis. The simulation results show that the safety control can improve the safety of trains evidently. Therefore, to ensure the ride comfort and safety of trains concurrently, the paper combines the advantages of the two methods, and further proposes a coordination control strategy. Simulations are carried out under different speeds and wear conditions. Results and Conclusions The simulation results show that the coordination control strategy cannot only ensure the safety of the train but also improve the ride comfort compared with the passive control. Therefore, it can enhance the comprehensive dynamic performance of the train. Finally, the paper studies the simulation analysis of the coordination control on the car body swing condition, and the simulation results show that the coordination control can restrain the car body swing phenomenon.