A Study on the Critical Speed of Railway Vehicles

This research has been performed to reveal the hysteresis phenomena of the hunting motion in a railway passenger car having a bolster. Since linear analysis can not explain them, bifurcation analysis is used to predict its outbreak velocities in this paper. However bifurcation analysis is attended with huge computing time, thus this research proposes more effective numerical algorithm to reduce it than previous researches. Stability of periodic solution is obtained by adapting of Floquet theory while stability of equilibrium solutions is obtained by eigen-value analysis. As a result, linear and nonlinear critical speed are acquired. Full scale roller rig test is carried out for the validation of the numerical result. Finally, it is certified that there are many similarities between numerical and test results.