Hopf bifurcation analysis of railway bogie

The railway bogie, the most important running component, has direct association with the dynamic performance of the whole vehicle system. The bifurcation type of the bogie that is affected by vehicle parameters will decide the behavior of the vehicle hunting stability. This paper mainly analyzes the effect of the yaw damper and wheel tread shape on the stability and bifurcation type of the railway bogie. The center manifold theorem is adopted to reduce the dimension of the bogie dynamical model, and the symbolic expression for determining the bifurcation type at the critical speed is obtained by the method of normal form. As a result, the influence of yaw damper on the bifurcation type of the bogie is given qualitatively in contrast to typical wheel profiles with high and low wheel tread effective conicities. Besides, the discriminant of bifurcation type for the wheel tread parameter variation is given which depicts the variation tendency of dynamics characteristics. Finally, numerical analysis is given to exhibit corresponding bifurcation diagrams.