Abstract:
Rail corrugation intensifies the dynamic wheel-rail interaction, degrading ride comfort and shortening the service life of track components. Dynamic vibration absorbers (DVAs), also known as tuned mass dampers (TMDs), have been used to mitigate track vibration responses, and their potential to suppress corrugation has been recognized. This study undertook a systematic investigation of the single-mode rail corrugation-suppression performance of DVAs. A finite-element model of the single wheel-rail-corrugation suppressors system was established for a typical system using CHN60 steel rails and for LM profiled wheels, and complex eigenvalue analysis was employed to extract the equivalent damping ratio of the system. The corrugation-mitigation effectiveness of the DVAs was then assessed from two aspects: system stability and vibration response. The influence of the two dominant DVA parameters—stiffness and mass ratio—was clarified through a controlled-variable analysis. A global parameter-optimization scheme that integrated the cubic-spline interpolation with dense grid search was proposed to identify the optimal DVA design within a continuous parameter space. The main findings were: The DVAs attenuated the friction-induced self-excited vibration of the wheel-rail system, raising the equivalent damping ratio of the originally unstable high-frequency mode from −
0.04993 to −
0.02753; Parametric analysis revealed that the stiffness and mass ratio were the tow key factors governing corrugation-suppression performances; The proposed optimization framework successfully extended the search from discrete cases to a continuous domain, yielding an optimal parameter set that further increased the minimum equivalent damping ratio to -0.00666.