HIL testing of wheel slide protection systems:criteria for continuous updating and validation

Assessment of railway wheel slide protection(WSP) systems involves the execution of complex experimental activities that are quite expensive and time-consuming, since they involve the physical reproduction of degraded adhesion conditions on a real railway line. WSP is devoted to regulating applied braking forces to avoid excessive wheel sliding in case of degraded adhesion conditions between wheel and rail. WSP must be also compliant to safety specifications related to assured braking performances and consumed air. Hardware in the loop(HIL) testing offers an affordable and sustainable way to accelerate these activities optimizing cost, duration and safety of experimental activities performed online. HIL test rigs are subjected to continuous updates, customization and natural ageing of their components. This work investigates the criteria that can be adopted to assure a continuous monitoring and validation of a real WSP test rig, the Italian test rig of Firenze Osmannoro.

Theoretical analysis on capillary adhesion of microsized plates with a substrate

The stiction of a thin plate induced by the capillary force has attracted much attention in the broad range of applications. A novel method is presented to calculate the capillary adhesion problem of the plate through analytical method. The expressions of the surface energy, the strain energy and the total potential energy of the plate-substrate system have been analyzed and delineated. By means of continuum mechanics and the principle of minimum potential energy, the governing equation of the plate with an arbitrary shape and the corresponding transversality boundary condition due to the moving bound have been derived. Then the critical adhesion radius of the circular plate has been solved according to the supplementary transversality condition. Thus the deflections of the plates are analytically calculated with different critical adhesion radii. The results may be beneficial to the engineering application and the micro/nanomeasurement.

Experimental prototyping of the adhesion braking control system design concept for a mechatronic bogie

The dynamic parameters of a roller rig vary as the adhesion level changes.The change in dynamics parameters needs to be analysed to estimate the adhesion level.One of these parameters is noise emanating from wheel–rail interaction.Most previous wheel–rail noise analysis has been conducted to mitigate those noises.However,in this paper,the noise is analysed to estimate the adhesion condition at the wheel–rail contact interface in combination with the other methodologies applied for this purpose.The adhesion level changes with changes in operational and environmental factors.To accurately estimate the adhesion level,the influence of those factors is included in this study.The testing and verification of the methodology required an accurate test prototype of the roller rig.In general,such testing and verification involve complex experimental works required by the intricate nature of the adhesion process and the integration of the different subsystems(i.e.controller,traction,braking).To this end,a new reduced-scale roller rig is developed to study the adhesion between wheel and rail roller contact.The various stages involved in the development of such a complex mechatronics system are described in this paper.Furthermore,the proposed brake control system was validated using the test rig under various adhesion conditions.The results indicate that the proposed brake controller has achieved a shorter stopping distance as compared to the conventional brake controller,and the brake control algorithm was able to maintain the operational condition even at the abrupt changes in adhesion condition.

A numerical study on tread wear and fatigue damage of railway wheels subjected to anti-slip control

Tread wear and rolling contact fatigue (RCF) damage propagated on railway wheels are the two extremely important focal points as they can tremendously deteriorate wheel/rail interactions and hunting stability and destroy wheel surface materials, and subsequently, cut down the lifetime of the wheels. The on-board anti-slip controllers are of essence aiming to hold back the striking slipping of the powered wheelsets under low-adhesion wheel/rail conditions. This paper intends to investigate the impact of anti-slip control on wheel tread wear and fatigue damage under diverse wheel/rail friction conditions. To this end, a prediction model for wheel wear and fatigue damage evolution on account of a comprehensive vehicle–track interaction model is extended, where the wheel/rail non-Hertzian contact algorithm is used. Furthermore, the effect of frictional wear on the fatigue damage at wheel surface is considered. The simulation results indicate that the wheel/rail contact is full-slip under the low-adhesion conditions with braking effort. The wear amount under the low-adhesion conditions is observably higher than that under the dry condition. It is further suggested that the wheel tread is prone to suffering more serious wear and fatigue damage issues with a higher anti-slip control threshold compared to that with a lower one.