Title: Advances on railway yaw damper characterisation exposed to small displacements

Authors: Alberto Conde Mellado, Eduardo Gomez, Jordi Vinolas

Addresses: CEIT and Tecnun, University of Navarra, Manuel de Lardizabal 15, 20018 San Sebastian, Spain. ' CEIT and Tecnun, University of Navarra, Manuel de Lardizabal 15, 20018 San Sebastian, Spain. ' CEIT and Tecnun, University of Navarra, Manuel de Lardizabal 15, 20018 San Sebastian, Spain

Abstract: This paper focuses on the behaviour of a railway yaw damper when it is subjected to small displacements. These operating conditions occur on high-speed tracks where a high degree of infrastructure maintenance assures low excitation levels of the vehicle. The dynamic response of the typical spring/dashpot in-series model is compared with experimental results of a damper in a wide range of operating conditions. The correlation of the results shows the limitations of this conventional damper model, and some simple modifications are proposed. The variations introduced to produce a |modified| damper model do not add complexity to the conventional model, but extend the operating range for which it has a good correlation with experimental results.

Keywords: damper modelling; railway vehicle dynamics; yaw dampers.

DOI: 10.1504/IJHVS.2006.010583

International Journal of Heavy Vehicle Systems, 2006 Vol.13 No.4, pp.263 - 280

Published online: 03 Aug 2006 *

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