The influences of nonlinearities on air spring vibration isolation characteristics.

Though the variable orifice air spring with linear orifice flow characteristics has been developed and tried in practice in the JNR, it still has nonlinearities attributed to state equations of air. Taking nonlinearities held in the air spring into consideration, comparative studies on the responses of both conventional and variable orifice air springs to vertical and roll excitations are made in this paper. Evaluation form the view-point of vertical and roll quality of railway vehicles shows that the variable orifice air spring has superior vibration isolation characteristics in both fields, especially in roll isolation, to the conventional air spring.