LATERAL STABILITY OF RAILWAY VEHICLE

Abstract

Lateral stability of railway vehicle is one of the most important and fundamental problems from the viewpoints of riding comfort and running safety and, therefore, many theoretical and experimental studies on this problem are being carried out for long time in various countries. There is an inherent conflict between lateral stability and good curving performance in railroad vehicle design. There are two basic problem areas that limit vehicle performance on tangent track: (1)Instability caused by external inputs from track irregularities, and (2) Self- excited instabilities inherent in the vehicle's design. The present work is aimed to analyze the lateral stability of the four-axle freight car caused by the self-excited instabilities inherent in the vehicle's . design through a 25 degrees of freedom model. A software has been developed to evaluate the vehicle lateral instability and critical speed