Design of tilt control patterns for air spring car-body tilting control system considering supply air reservoir pressure constraint

This study deals with a tilt control pattern design for a tilting train using air springs. When a railway vehicle travels on a curve, the tilting system tilts the car body by supplying compressed air to the air springs on the outer rail, causing them to expand. However, when the vehicle runs on a railway track with continuous curves, there is a possibility that the vehicle may run out of compressed air. Therefore, in this study, based on the compressed air consumption estimated from the internal pressure of the supply air reservoir, a tilt control pattern that reduces the car body tilt angle was generated. The tilt control pattern for continuous operation of the tilting system was calculated using dynamic programming. To calculate the tilt control pattern, a four degrees of freedom model combining a simplified vehicle model and a supply air reservoir model was used. For simplicity, a condition for continuous operation of the tilting system was that the internal pressure of the supply air reservoir did not fall below the internal pressure of the air spring. Under this constraint, we generated the tilt control patterns for a route with continuous curves with the same curvature. As a result, by selecting curves with shorter circular sections and generating tilt control patterns with reduced tilt angles on those curves, continuous operation was enabled, although ride comfort deteriorated.