Fault-tolerant design and evaluation for a railway bogie active steering system

ABSTRACT

Active suspension system can drastically improve dynamic behaviours of the railway vehicle but will also introduce safety-critical issues. The fault-tolerant analysis, therefore, is essential for the design and implementation of active suspension. However, this issue did not receive enough attention so far and only few papers can be found related to the fault tolerance of active steering for the railway vehicle. In this work, an approach based on Risk Priority Number is established to present quantitative assessment for fault tolerance of actuation system. Then this method is adopted to compare nine different active steering schemes resulting in a novel, comprehensive approach that enables a quantitative evaluation of different designs of the actuation system and of different principles to improve the fault tolerance. The impacts of typical failure modes are investigated through multi-body simulation and quantified by severity factor. Finally, the fault tolerance of different actuation schemes is evaluated by RPN values.

KEYWORDS:

• Fault tolerance
• active steering
• hydraulic servo actuator
• electro-hydrostatic actuator
• failure mode

Acknowledgement

The contents of this publication only reflect the authors’ view and the Joint Undertaking is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information contained in the paper. The authors thank Mr Rocco Giossi, Prof. Roger Goodall, Dr Rickard Persson and Prof. Sebastian Stichel for their useful discussions of methods and results throughout this work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The work presented in this paper has received funding from the Shift2Rail Joint Undertaking under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement no. 777564.