Keywords: flexural vibration, damping, dynamic vibration absorber, vibration reduction, vibration isolation.

This paper presents a simple technique to reduce flexural vibrations in a railway vehicle carbody supporting under-floor equipment using high-damping elastic mounts. This is a type of dynamic vibration absorber (DVA) utilising under-floor equipment as the mass element. However, it has a unique feature inspired by the damping effect of passengers boarding a railway vehicle i.e. to set the natural frequency of the under-floor equipment suspension system to lower than that of the targeted carbody flexural vibration and uses a high-damping material. This causes no need for a cumbersome procedure to adjust the natural frequency and damping characteristics which is necessary in ordinary DVAs. Some numerical studies were first carried out to check the feasibility of the concepts using a simple two degree of freedom model. Then a prototype of the elastic mounting device was built as a simple rubber mount and a series of excitation tests were conducted in the rolling stock testing plant at the Railway Technical Research Institute using a Shinkansen type test vehicle by applying those elastic mounting devices. Good vibration reduction performance, including multi-modal vibration reduction and vibration isolation from the equipment, was observed.

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