Abstract
Mechatronically-guided railway vehicles are of paramount importance in addressing the increasing interest in reducing wheel-rail wear and improving guidance and steering. Conventional passively-guided rail vehicles are limited by the mechanical constraints of the suspension elements. Currently, a typical rail vehicle suspension needs to be sufficiently stiff to stabilize the wheelsets while being complaint enough to negotiate curved track profiles. The suspension is therefore a compromise for the contradictory requirements of curving and stability.In mechatronic vehicles, actuators are used with the conventional suspension components to provide additional stiffness or damping forces needed to optimise a vehicle for a wide variety of scenarios, and not rely on a sub optimal combination of passive components.This research demonstrates the benefits of active guidance and steering when compared to a conventional vehicle using simulation results from a multi-body simulation software Simpack. It also provides insights into the relative performance of the mechatronic schemes. The Simpack modeling allows for a complex model with high fidelity, which provides an additional level of proof of the control algorithms working on a real rail vehicle. Each vehicle is assessed in terms of guidance on straight track, steering on curved track, actuation requirements and wheel-rail wear. Significant benefits are demonstrated in one of the guided vehicles with independently-rotating wheelsets.
Highlights
This paper presents a comparison of a number of mechatronic steering concepts for rail vehicles with conventional bogies and draws comparisons on ride quality, actuation requirements, sensing requirements and track damage, using a conventional passively steered vehicle as a baseline
This paper considers three different active steering strategies that are applied to a full rail vehicle modeled using a multi-body simulation (MBS) software called Simpack
This paper assesses three different control strategies using a nonlinear vehicle model which is developed in an industry-standard software
Summary
This paper presents a comparison of a number of mechatronic steering concepts for rail vehicles with conventional bogies and draws comparisons on ride quality, actuation requirements, sensing requirements and track damage, using a conventional passively steered vehicle as a baseline. The conical tread of a conventional railway wheelset (two wheels solidly connected by an axle) provides a passive vehicle guidance mechanism that has been accepted best practice for nearly two centuries. This conical profile causes an unconstrained solid-axle wheelset to be marginally stable and oscillate along the track in a sinusoidal motion known as ‘hunting’ [2]. To avoid this problem, the yaw motion of the wheelsets is constrained by a stiff suspension, stabilizing the wheelsets but interfering with the natural curving action of the wheelset. This is a well-known problem and suspensions have to be designed to meet the contradictory requirements of curving and stability at high speeds, with vehicles optimised for a particular operating regime
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