Abstract
Bending vibration characteristics of railway vehicles have been investigated in general under excitation tests, in which a carbody was directly excited by a shaker. It is however very difficult with their results to evaluate the ride comfort of passengers under a condition that the vehicle runs on a certain track. The authors are therefore developing a "vertical vibration simulator" for railway vehicles. The simulator consists of a excitation system equipped with linear actuators, the elastic supporting device installed between wheels and rails, and analytical techniques to estimate the power spectral density (PSD) and the ride comfort level (L_T) which feature the ride comfort. In this paper, we describe the excitation tests performed using an actual commuter car and the estimated PSD and L_T are compared with what substantially measured under the running conditions.
