Abstract
Wheel flats are a key fault in railway systems, which can bring great harm to vehicle operation safety. At present, most wheel flat detection methods use qualitative detection and do not meet practical demands. In this paper, we used a railway wheel flat measurement method based on a parallelogram mechanism to detect wheel flats dynamically and quantitatively. Based on our experiments, we found that system performance was influenced by the train speed. When the train speed was higher than a certain threshold, the wheel impact force would cause vibration of the measuring mechanism and affect the detection accuracy. Since the measuring system was installed at the on-site entrance of the train garage, to meet the speed requirement, a three-dimensional simulation model was established, which was based on the rigid-flexible coupled multibody dynamics theory. The speed threshold of the measuring mechanism increased by the reasonable selection of the damping coefficients of the hydraulic damper, the measuring positions, and the downward displacements of the measuring ruler. Finally, we applied the selected model parameters to the parallelogram mechanism, where field measurements showed that the experimental results were consistent with the simulation results.
Highlights
Wheels are the most important bearing and moving parts of a train that have a crucial impact on driving safety
The ultrasonic method is divided into the electromagnetic ultrasonic method [9] and the ultrasonic ranging method [10,11]
The measurement results under different train speeds before parameter reasonable selection is shown in Figure 16, and we found that system performance was influenced by the speed of the train
Summary
Wheels are the most important bearing and moving parts of a train that have a crucial impact on driving safety. Sensors 2019, 19, 3614 the ultrasound pulse to the rail–wheel contact point The insufficiency of this method was that the measuring accuracy was affected by the measuring distance, so it was difficult to accurately detect the wheel flat of the whole circumference of the rolling wheel. The wheel impact load detection method is used to detect the impact force of a wheel flat on the rail by installing a series of strain gauge [12], accelerometer [13,14,15,16,17], optical fiber sensor [18,19,20], piezoelectric cable [21], and other sensors at different positions along the rail. Sensor to detect wheel-rail force at a train speed up to 350 km/h In their experiments, the data were analyzed in a time domain and frequency spectrum to detect wheel flats and roundness. The model was verified by field tests and presented theoretical evidence for system installation and selection principle of components
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