Abstract
Active railway suspensions offer significant improvements in performance, but their take-up in service operation worldwide has been very small. This paper explores the possibility of mounting the actuators between vehicles rather than the conventional position across the secondary suspensions, saving weight, power and cost through a reduction in the number of actuators required. A three-vehicle train is modelled using Mathworks' MatLab software and the performance of inter-vehicle actuators is compared to conventional actuators, initially using idealised actuators for control strategy development but also using realistic actuators.
