It has been recently pointed out that railway vehicle passengers do not behave as inert masses but as dissipative elements: they increase modal damping without significantly affecting the natural frequencies of the carbodies. The phenomenon is more prominent in current lightweight high-speed railway vehicles, because weight reduction is usually attained at the expense of reduced stiffness. The few works that deal with the influence of passengers in actual structures are confronted with a large number of coupled structural vibration modes with cumbersome mode shapes, and this hinders the understanding of the physical mechanisms that make passengers attenuate vibrations. This work sheds some light on this topic from three points of view: new experimental tests on an actual carbody to corroborate and broaden existing results; simplified experimental tests, with small living beings (toddlers and pets) on a simplified pinned-pinned beam without modal coupling, to better determine the physical phenomena involved in the interaction between the passenger and the flexible structure; and improved analytical beam-cushion-passenger models to clarify the experimental results. All results suggest that passengers do indeed behave as classical dynamic vibration absorbers the positions of which with respect to the anti-nodes of mode shapes is key in vibration attenuation.

最近有人指出，铁路车辆乘客的行为不是惰性质量，而是耗散元件：它们增加了模态阻尼，而不会显着影响车体的固有频率。这种现象在目前轻量化的高速铁路车辆中更为突出，因为减重通常是以降低刚度为代价的。在实际结构中处理乘客影响的少数作品面临着大量耦合结构振动模式和繁琐的模式形状，这阻碍了对使乘客衰减振动的物理机制的理解。这项工作从三个角度阐明了这个主题：在实际车身上进行新的实验测试，以证实和扩大现有结果；简化实验测试，在没有模态耦合的简化销钉梁上使用小型生物（幼儿和宠物），以更好地确定乘客与柔性结构之间相互作用所涉及的物理现象；并改进了分析梁垫乘客模型以阐明实验结果。所有结果表明，乘客确实表现得像经典的动态吸振器，其相对于振型波腹的位置是减振的关键。并改进了分析梁垫乘客模型以阐明实验结果。所有结果表明，乘客确实表现得像经典的动态吸振器，其相对于振型波腹的位置是减振的关键。并改进了分析梁垫乘客模型以阐明实验结果。所有结果表明，乘客确实表现得像经典的动态吸振器，其相对于振型波腹的位置是减振的关键。