Application of different control techniques to railway semi-active suspension systems

High speed technology may benefit from the acquisition of smart know-how from the automotive and aerospace sectors. In particular in the automotive sector the application of semi-active magneto-rheological (M-R) dampers has been successfully tested. Application of M-R technology and more generally of semi-active system on rail systems is documented and it is still confined to a limited number of known examples. However there is a growing interest for these kinds of solution which represents a good trade-off between the performance of a fully active system and the reliability assured by passive ones. In this paper some benchmark cases are proposed and used to verify how different control approaches lead to different results both in terms of robustness and performance.