Abstract
The increasing need for repairs of polygonized wheels on high-speed railways in China is becoming problematic. At high speeds, polygonized wheels cause abnormal vibrations at the wheel-rail interface that can be detected via axle-box accelerations. To investigate the quantitative relationship between axle-box acceleration and wheel polygonization in both the time and frequency domains and under high-speed conditions, a dynamics model was developed to simulate the vehicle-track coupling system and that considers both wheel and track flexibility. The calculated axle-box accelerations were analyzed by using the improved ensemble empirical mode decomposition and Wigner-Ville distribution time-frequency method. The numerical results show that the maximum axle-box accelerations and their frequencies are quantitatively related to the harmonic order and out-of-roundness amplitude of polygonized wheels. In addition, measuring the axle-box acceleration enables both the detection of wheel polygonization and the identification of the degree of damage.
Highlights
The high-speed train system is rapidly developing in China and, as a result of rolling contact and vibration impact, wheel polygonization, which is a type of railway-wheel out of roundness (OOR), is a growing problem
Failures in vehicle system components have appeared in the Chinese high-speed railway system, such as gearbox cracks [2], bolt fracture at the axle-box cover and brake disk [3], and other fastener failures that are caused by high-frequency impact due to wheel polygons
The study results show that the revised Hilbert-Huang transform (HHT) can be adopted to distinguish out-of-round wheels from normal wheels
Summary
The high-speed train system is rapidly developing in China and, as a result of rolling contact and vibration impact, wheel polygonization, which is a type of railway-wheel out of roundness (OOR), is a growing problem. Express train in Germany in the summer of 1998, in which 101 people were killed and 194 injured, was attributed to a fatigue crack in a wheel rim caused by a wheel polygon. Failures in vehicle system components have appeared in the Chinese high-speed railway system, such as gearbox cracks [2], bolt fracture at the axle-box cover and brake disk [3], and other fastener failures that are caused by high-frequency impact due to wheel polygons. A periodic wheel out-of-roundness leads to noise and vibration levels that annoy passengers, especially at certain train speeds
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