Effect of Lateral Linear Stiffness on Nonlinear Characteristics of Hunting Motion of a Railway Wheelset

Railway wheelset experiences the problem of hunting above a critical speed, which is a kind of self-excited oscillation. At the critical speed, it is known that the system undergoes a subcritical Hopf bifurcation. Therefore, for clarifying the nonlinear characteristics of hunting it is very important to detect, for example, the nonlinear forces in the wheelset due to the creep forces acting between the wheels and rails, and the nonlinear component of the resorting forces by the suspensions. However, it is impossible to determine each force quantitatively. In the present paper, it is first shown, by using the center manifold theory and the method of normal form, that the nonlinear characteristics of the bifurcation in a wheelset model with two degrees of freedom are governed by a single parameter, hence each nonlinear force need not be detected when examining the nonlinear characteristics. Also, a method of determining the governing parameter from experimentally observed radiuses of the unstable limit cycle is proposed. Next, we experimentally investigate the variation of the parameter due to the presence of linear spring suspensions in the lateral direction and discuss the variation of the nonlinear characteristics of the hunting motion, which depends on the lateral stiffness. As a result, the improvement of the stability of the wheelset against the disturbance by the linear spring suspensions is clarified.