Abstract
The authors investigated the effect due to passengers on vertical elastic vibrations of railway vehicle carbody experimentally and analytically. Stationary vibration tests for an actual commuter vehicle on which up to 14 passengers aboard were carried out using a multiple input wheelset-excitation system. The commuter vehicle has a number of natural modes of elastic vibration in the high-sensitive frequency region of human, and two of them particularly affect the Frequency Response Function (FRF) of the carbody. It was apparent that the peak values of FRF, which correspond to those two natural modes reduced in a similar manner when the number of passenger increased. On the other hand, the changes of peak frequencies are very small. The effects due to passengers' posture and distribution are also studied. Moreover, we proposed an analytical model to express the three-dimensional elastic vibration of carbody and the effect due to the passengers, and verified the adaptability of the model by comparing the calculation results with the experimental results.
