A simplification of railway vehicle lateral vibration model based on LQG control strategy

ABSTRACT

In designing linear quadratic Gaussian (LQG) controller based on a full-size railway vehicle, the solutions for the coefficient matrices A, B, Q, R, and N can be quite difficult. Moreover, debugging the weighting coefficients of so many control indexes can be onerous, but the calculation results for a simplified vehicle model are very inaccurate. With these two factors taken into consideration, a seven degrees of freedom (DOFs) simplified railway vehicle model is proposed, in which the wheelset dynamic motion parameters are used as the input excitation. When an LQG controller is designed based on this model, the eight DOFs of the four wheelsets can be left out and the dimensions of the coefficient matrices A, B, C, D, Q, and N will be reduced by at least 16. Even so, the wheel-rail non-linear contact relation can be considered. It is found that the maximum deviations of the calculation results between the simplified model and the 62-DOF full-size three-dimensional model established in the software ADAMS/Rail are <16%. The weighting coefficients are defined by means of an analytic hierarchy process method, and a quite obvious control effect can be obtained by designing the LQG controller based on the simplified model.

KEYWORDS:

• Simplified vehicle model
• LQG controller
• wheel-rail relation
• ADAMS/Rail
• multi-body dynamic simulation
• analytic hierarchy process (AHP)

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [Grant Nos. 51605315, 11172183, and 11572206], the Open Project Program of the State Key Laboratory of Traction Power [Grant No. TPL1707], and the Science and Technology Research Project of Hebei Province [Grant No. BJ2016047].

Notes on contributors

WANG Yi-Xuan

Wang Yi-xuan, who was born in August 1992, Hebei province, China. And he is currently studying as an postgraduate student in Shijiazhuang Tiedao University. On the other hand, his research interests are multi-body dynamics analysis and semi-active control.

CHEN En-Li

Chen En-li, he is currently working as a professor and doctoral supervisor in Shijiazhuang Tiedao University. And his research interests: vibration signals analysis and vehicle dynamics analysis.

LIU Peng-Fei

Liu Peng-fei, who received his Ph.D. from Southwest Jiaotong University. And he is currently working as a teacher in Shijiazhuang Tiedao University.

ZHANG Lin

Zhang Lin, she is currently studying as an postgraduate student in Shijiazhuang Tiedao University.