Robust control and actuator dynamics compensation for railway vehicles

ABSTRACT

A robust controller is designed for active steering of a high speed train bogie with solid axle wheel sets to reduce track irregularity effects on the vehicle’s dynamics and improve stability and curving performance. A half-car railway vehicle model with seven degrees of freedom equipped with practical accelerometers and angular velocity sensors is considered for the H_∞ control design. The controller is robust against the wheel/rail contact parameter variations. Field measurement data are used as the track irregularities in simulations. The control force is applied to the vehicle model via ball-screw electromechanical actuators. To compensate the actuator dynamics, the time delay is identified online and is used in a second-order polynomial extrapolation carried out to predict and modify the control command to the actuator. The performance of the proposed controller and actuator dynamics compensation technique are examined on a one-car railway vehicle model with realistic structural parameters and nonlinear wheel and rail profiles. The results showed that for the case of nonlinear wheel and rail profiles significant improvements in the active control performance can be achieved using the proposed compensation technique.

KEYWORDS:

• Robust control
• active suspension
• sensors
• actuator
• dynamics compensation
• railways

Acknowledgements

This study is a joint research work done at the Center of Excellence in Railway Mechanics (CHARMEC) at Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden and Control and Systems Engineering group at University of Salford Manchester, UK. The anonymous reviewers are cordially acknowledged for their fruitful comments which improved the quality of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCiD

Seyed Milad Mousavi Bideleh http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2826-9602

Viktor Berbyuk http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8862-1148

Additional information

Funding

The Ekman family foundation and Chalmers Stiftelsen are gratefully appreciated for the financial support of this research.