Evaluation for riding comfort of railway vehicle with optical topography

Abstract

We evaluated the ride comfort of high-speed railway vehicle for the section between Morioka and Shin-Aomori in Tohoku Shinkansen-line by using the optical topography. Although the result shows the unclear correlation between the ride quality level and the stress brain index (LIR) estimated by the difference between left and right cerebral blood flow, we obtained the clear correlation between the tendency of ride quality level variation and LIR variation for the each section. For the correlation parameters between differences of LIR and ride quality level, 0.72 for the vertical vibration and 0.69 for the lateral vibration, respectively, were obtained. In addition, we found that the objective estimation of the optical topography has a high potential to evaluate the riding comfort for the total experimental condition in detail under the time series and/or the running section.