Abstract
This report presents a simple method to reduce flexural vibrations in a railway vehicle carbody just by supporting underfloor equipments using high-damping elastic mounts. Recent studies by the authors show that on-boarding passengers have large additional damping effect on the carbody flexural vibrations. Since a human as a elastic body itself has relatively large damping coefficient, we tried to simulate the additional damping effect of passengers by supporting underfloor equipments using high-damping elastic material. Some numerical studies are firstly carried out to check the feasibity of the idea using simple single degree of freedom and two degrees of freedom systems. Then, two types of elastic mounting devices are built for actual railway vehicle. A series of excitation tests are conducted in the rolling stock testing plant in the Railway Technical Research Institute (RTRI) using a commuter type test vehicle by applying those elastic mounting devices, and good vibration reduction performances are observred by the tests.
