Research on inverse method of vertical track irregularities based on adaptive Kalman filter

Abstract

Track irregularity is the basic input for the wheel-rail interaction of rail vehicles. Therefore, understanding of track irregulates is essential for the top-down design of vehicle system dynamics and track maintenance. Based on the method of Kalman filter, this paper derived the vehicle system dynamic model of a high-speed train and developed an adaptive Kalman filter. In the study, the dynamic responses of body and bogie system are taken as the observable quantities, which is further employed to estimate the vertical track irregularities based on the adaptive Kalman filter. The results show that the proposed method is capable of estimation of track irregulates by using limited dynamic response obtained from the body and bogie system. In addition, the estimated track irregulates show good correlation with the original track irregularities, which further implies that the proposed track irregularities reverse method can yield very high accuracy in the estimation of track irregularities.