Structural topology optimization of railway vehicle wheel damping plates considering acoustic-vibration interaction

A topology optimization method for railway wheel damping plates is proposed to suppress the acoustic radiation caused by structural vibration, with the acoustic–vibration interaction explicitly taken into account. A configuration optimization framework for damping wheels is constructed by combining this method with evolutionary structural optimization (ESO) and vehicle dynamics. Taking the sound power radiated under the dominant peak-frequency excitations of the damping wheel as the objective function, the framework minimizes the acoustic radiation of the wheel under a prescribed damping-material volume constraint, while the running stability and safety of the train are simultaneously ensured through a coupled multibody dynamics evaluation. The verification through numerical examples shows that the peak sound power of the optimized damping wheel is reduced by up to 3.7 dB, and the full-frequency total sound power and the peak sound pressure level are reduced by up to 1.7 dB and 22.4 dB(A), respectively. By effectively redistributing the damping material, the proposed method attenuates structural vibrations at multiple target frequencies while achieving effective noise reduction.