An active suspension system for enhancing running safety of high-speed trains under strong crosswind

The running safety of trains subjected to strong crosswinds has become a major concern for the high-speed railways passing through complicated mountain areas. This paper reports an active secondary suspension system to improve the operation stability and running safety of high-speed trains under strong crosswind. The goal of the active suspension system is to regulate the lateral, yaw, and roll motion attitudes of high-speed train carbody, in which a controller is designed by combining with a disturbance observer and the sliding mode control method. To further verify the proposed active suspension strategy, a crosswind-vehicle-track coupled dynamics model is established, where the unsteady aerodynamic loads and random track irregularity excitations are considered. The results show that the proposed active suspension system has the efficient potential to regulate the carbody motion attitudes and enhance the anti-rolling performance of high-speed trains. In comparison to a quasi-static control strategy of active suspension, the use of the proposed active suspension system has led to a significant reduction in both wheel-load reduction ratios and derailment risks of high-speed trains.