Energy Harvesting Potential Comparison Study of a Novel Railway Vehicle Bogie System With the Hydraulic-Electromagnetic Energy-Regenerative Shock Absorber
Authors: Mi Jia , Xu Lin , Guo Sijing , Meng Lingshuai , Abdelkareem Mohamed A. A. 
Published: July 2017

With the development of high-speed rail technology, the interaction between wheel and track becomes more serious, which threatens the running stability, riding quality and safety of the vehicle. Due to the selected stiffness and damping parameters, conventional passive suspensions cannot fit in with the diverse conditions of the railway. Additionally, among these vibrations contains a large amount of energy, if this vibrational energy can be recycled and used for the active suspension to control, it will be a good solution compared to the conventional passive suspensions. Many energy-harvesting shock absorbers have been proposed in recent years, the most popular design is the electromagnetic harvester including linear electromagnetic shock absorbers, rotational electromagnetic shock absorbers, the mechanical motion rectifier (MMR), and the hydraulic electromagnetic energy-regenerative shock absorber (HESA). With different energy converting mechanisms, the complicated effects of the inertia and nonlinear damping behaviors will severely impact the vehicle dynamic performance such as the ride comfort and road handling.

In the past few years, engineers and researchers have done relevant researches on HESA which have shown that it has good effects and proposed several suspension energy regeneration solutions for applying to car. This paper presents a novel application of HESA into a bogie system for railway vehicles comparing to the conventional suspension systems. HESA is composed of hydraulic cylinder, check valves, accumulators, hydraulic motor, generator, pipelines and so on. In HESA, the high-pressure oil which is produced by shock absorber reciprocation could be exported to drive the hydraulic motor, so as to drive the generator to generate electricity. In this way, HESA regenerate the mechanical vibrational energy that is otherwise dissipated by the traditional shock absorber as heat energy. Because the bogie has two sets of suspension systems, a dynamic model of bogie based on AMESim is established in order to clarify the influence of the dynamic characteristics effect and the energy harvesting efficiency when installing the HESA into different sets of the bogie. Then, set the HESA model into each suspension system of the bogie and input with the corresponding characteristic excitation, the influence of the dynamic characteristics and the energy harvesting efficiency are analyzed and compared.

The simulation results show that the system can effectively reduce the vibration of the carriage, while maintaining good potential to recycle vibratory energy. Based on the results of the simulation, the relationships as well as differences between the first suspension system and second suspension system have been concluded, which are useful for the design of HESA-Bogie. Moreover, comparing the energy harvesting efficiency discrepancy between the two suspension systems, the potential of energy harvesting of a novel railway vehicle bogie system with HESA has been evaluated and then the best application department has been found, which indicates the theoretical feasibilities of the HESA-bogie to improve the fuel economy.