Evaluation for aged characteristic of rubber bush of rolling stock by vibration response

Abstract

Metal-rubber composites products are used in a bogie for shock absorbing and transmitting acceleration force properly. At ordinary maintenance, visual inspection and load test are carried out to confirm the changes of load displacement characteristic. However, the maintenance requires disassembling the components of a bogie and heavy weight lifting. In this paper, an impact test was conducted to measure the natural frequency of a single towing link and evaluate the spring constant of the shock absorbing rubber. Then, we confirmed that the calculated spring constant agreed with the measured storage spring constant by considering pre-load influence on the rubber.