Compensator skyhook damping control for railway vehicles

Abstract

The work in this thesis proposed a control method for active technology in trains using skyhook damping control algorithm. The main advantage of the method is the good improvement of passenger ride comfort on straight track such that it can be computed rapidly using a highly effective controller which show significant effect in compromising the tradeoff between ride quality vs track following. The skyhook damping proposed in this project is presented in quarter car model. Conventional skyhook damping uses high pass filter to achieve the tradeoff between ride quality and track following. Here lead-lag compensator that acted as filter is proposed. MATLAB simulations are carried out under some conditions to test the effectiveness of the proposed method, namely step response, rise time and percentage over shoot. The advantage of the proposed method over the conventional skyhook damping is expected to increase by a significant percent in the train speed and a relative percentage decrease in the steady state oscillations. It is predicted that the method can be very useful in the design of a practical high performance, low cost controller of active suspension railway system.