Dynamic vibration absorbers (DVAs) are widely accepted in vibration engineering as one of the most suitable ways to suppress undesirable low-damped resonance. In railway design, it is often placed on the track as a mitigation measure coupled to a floating slab. This paper presents the study of a tram vehicle equipped with DVAs with the aim to suppress the specific mode that affects the vehicle/track interaction and the surrounding ground wave generation. A complete vehicle/track/soil numerical model is developed and used to evaluate the dynamics of the whole system. Modal decomposition is applied to the vehicle/track model to obtain the optimal DVA parameter values for any location. Different DVA masses are analysed and different DVA locations are proposed. From the results, the vehicle bogie is revealed to be the best location and a compromise can be found for the DVA mass for reducing the ground vibration level of around 20%.
