Concept Design of an Active Steering Bogie for Urban Railway Vehicles

An active steering bogie has been theoretically proved to improve both stability and steering performance remarkably. However, It has not been commercialized yet even though many researchers have been trying to develop it because some technical difficulties still exist such as information acquisition fer active control, increasing mechanical components, high energy consumption, fail-safe problem and so on. To solve those problems, an advanced active steering mechanism is proposed in this paper. With this mechanism, required control force is small enough to use direct drives. Therefore, the number of additional mechanical components can be minimized since mechanical transducers like gears are not necessary. Fail-safe function can be also inserted easily. In this paper, concept design of the proposed active steering bogie is introduced and the possibility is verified through computer simulation using linear dynamic model.