School of Electronic, Electrical and Systems Engineering

A tilting railway vehicle is a dynamically complex structure. Many of the dynamic modes of the system are coupled (i.e. vehicle lateral and roll modes) and the coupling in certain situations is very significant which unavoidably causes difficulties in control system design, especially for the local vehicle control strategies. Meanwhile, the high speed results in the worse ride quality on the straight line, an effective solution is to use the active secondary suspension to replace the passive suspension.

This project will focus on investigating local control strategies on integration of tilt and active lateral suspension control and assess system performance. In particular, it is envisaged to implement one of the proposed control algorithms on FPGA/DSP and investigate its performance using a hardware-in-the-loop procedure.

References (or Publications)

1. Ronghui Zhou, Argyrios Zolotas, Roger Goodall. Enhancing tilt system performance by integrating with active lateral suspension control, Proceedings of the 21st International Symposium on Dynamics of Vehicles on Roads and Tracks( IAVSD), Sweden, 17-21 August 2009.
2. Ronghui Zhou, Argyrios Zolotas, Roger Goodall. Integrated tilt and active lateral secondary suspension control, Proceedings of the 5th international symposium on speed-up, safety and service technology for railway and maglev systems (STECH'09), Japan, 15-17 June 2009.
3. R. Zhou, A. C. Zolotas, and R. M. Goodall. Model based integrated tilt and active lateral secondary sus- pension control. Proceedings of the 23rd IAR Workshop on Advanced Control and Diagnosis, page:186-191, Coventry, UK, 2008