An investigation into evaluation methods for ride comfort of railway vehicles in the case of carbody hunting instability

Ride comfort is a long-standing research topic and has been deeply investigated due to its great influence on evaluating the performances of railway vehicles. Many standards have been proposed to evaluate the ride comfort of the railway vehicles. However, the carbody hunting instability was rarely considered during the evaluation of ride comfort. To face this problem, this paper performs the comparison of various evaluation methods for ride comfort in the case of carbody hunting instability. The Sperling method, Mean Comfort standard method and Continuous Comfort method are introduced and compared focusing on the specific experimental data. The benefits and limitations of these methods are analyzed and the most appropriate evaluation method for the condition of carbody hunting instability is determined. Moreover, making full use of the peak value information, an original evaluation method of ride comfort specifically to the carbody hunting instability is proposed. The critical parameters of the method are compared and discussed to investigate their influences on the evaluation results.