Since the concept of active suspensions appeared, its large possible benefits has attracted continuous exploration in the field of railway engineering. With new demands of higher speed, better ride comfort and lower maintenance cost for railway vehicles, active suspensions are very promising technologies. Being the starting point of commercial application of active suspensions in rail vehicles, tilting trains have become a great success in some countries. With increased technical maturity of sensors and actuators, active suspension has unprecedented development opportunities. In this work, the basic concepts are summarized with new theories and solutions that have appeared over the last decade. Experimental studies and the implementation status of different active suspension technologies are described as well. Firstly, tilting trains are briefly described. Thereafter, an in-depth study for active secondary and primary suspensions is performed. For both topics, after an introductory section an explanation of possible solutions existing in the literature is given. The implementation status is reported. Active secondary suspensions are categorized into active and semi-active suspensions. Primary suspensions are instead divided between acting on solid-axle wheelsets and independently rotating wheels. Lastly, a brief summary and outlook is presented in terms of benefits, research status and challenges. The potential for active suspensions in railway applications is outlined.

Within the Shift2Rail project Run2Rail, an innovative single axle running gear with only one suspension step is proposed. A composite material frame shall be used both as structural and as suspension element. To improve curving performance active wheelset steering control is introduced. The selected control aims to minimize the longitudinal creepage by controlling the lateral wheelset position on the track. A two-axle vehicle is created in the MBS program SIMPACK and co-simulation is established with Simulink. The control strategy used is a simple PID control. A set of run cases with different curves and speeds is selected to verify the performance. The control gain optimal for high non-compensated lateral acceleration (NLA) tends to produce unstable results for low speeds. Control gain scaling is introduced based on vehicle speed and online estimation of the curvature. The proposed gain scheduling approach maintains the simple control formulation still solving the instability problem. Gain scheduling allows use of optimal control gains for all combinations of curve radii and vehicle speed and thereby taking the full advantage that the active wheelset steering brings to a vehicle with single axle running gears. 

A mechatronic rail vehicle with reduced tare weight, two axles and only one level of suspension is proposed with the objective of reducing investment and maintenance costs. A wheelset to carbody connection frame in composite material will be used both as structural and as suspension element. Active control is introduced to steer the wheelsets and improve the curving performance. A feedforward control approach for active curve steering based on non-compensated lateral acceleration and curvature is proposed to overcome stability issues of a feedback approach. The feedforward approach is synthesised starting from the best achievable results of selected feedback approaches in terms of wheel energy dissipation and required actuation force. A set of 357 running cases (embracing 7 curves, 17 speeds per curve and 3 conicities) is used to design the controller. The controller is shown to perform well for conicity and track geometry variations and under the presence of track irregularities.

Within the Shift2Rail projects Pivot2 and NEXTGEAR, an innovative Metro vehicle with single axle running gear and only one suspension step is proposed. A composite material running gear frame is developed to be used both as structural and as suspension element. The design with only one suspension step can significantly degrade the passengers ride comfort. Thus, active modal control is implemented both in lateral and vertical direction to increase the performance of the system. The running gear frame is modelled in Abaqus® as well as the carbody. Structural modes of both elements are implemented in SIMPACK®. A hydraulic actuator model is developed in Simscape®, where two pressure-controlled valves are used to control the pressure inside the chambers of a double acting hydraulic cylinder. A co-simulation environment is then established between SIMPACK® and Simulink®. The vehicle is running with speeds between 10 and 120 km/h. Active modal control makes it possible to maintain ride comfort levels of conventional bogie vehicles with this innovative single axle and single suspension step running gear, promising substantial weight savings of about 400 kg/m. The single axle running gear solution with active comfort control developed here can be an attractive alternative to bogies, providing reduced Life Cycle Costs.

The Shift2Rail project Pivot2 introduces an innovative metro vehicle with two single axle running gears with only one suspension step to reduce the vehicle's weight. A U-shaped connection frame is designed in Carbon Fibre Reinforced Polymer to further reduce weight and incorporate the anti-roll bar. Due to the poor ride comfort of the vehicle with standard passive dampers, all six dampers are replaced by hydraulic actuators. Modal control is applied and optimized with genetic algorithms. Despite the good improvements obtained, the weighted vertical acceleration remains above the acceptance level. Two modifications of modal control are studied, i.e., modal control with additional sensor, and blended control. Based on the frequency response of the results, it is proposed a low-pass filtered blended controller to neglect frame accelerations high frequency content. This last improves vertical comfort at the expenses of a more complex control system in comparison to modal control.

The mechatronic vehicle developed within the Shift2Rail projects Run2Rail, Pivot, NEXTGEAR, and Pivot2 is evaluated with respect to wheel wear. The KTH wear model is used to determine the coefficients of Archard’s wear map to reproduce measured worn wheel profiles of the present vehicle running on Metro Madrid line 10. The same wear model is then used to evaluate the performance of the mechatronic vehicle controlled with two variants of a feedforward controller. The first one uses on-board measurements, while the second one is optimized using firefly optimisation algorithms assuming knowledge of the travelled track. The control strategy based on on-board measurements shows improvements above 60% in terms of lost wheel volume due to wear, compared to the standard bogie vehicle. The optimized controller reaches improvements above 70%. Good coherence is found between improvements predicted with the wear number and the ones achieved in terms of lost wheel volume.