A numerical model of a HIL scaled roller rig for simulation of wheel–rail degraded adhesion condition

Abstract

Scaled roller rigs used for railway applications play a fundamental role in the development of new technologies and new devices, combining the hardware in the loop (HIL) benefits with the reduction of the economic investments. The main problem of the scaled roller rig with respect to the full scale ones is the improved complexity due to the scaling factors. For this reason, before building the test rig, the development of a software model of the HIL system can be useful to analyse the system behaviour in different operative conditions. One has to consider the multi-body behaviour of the scaled roller rig, the controller and the model of the virtual vehicle, whose dynamics has to be reproduced on the rig. The main purpose of this work is the development of a complete model that satisfies the previous requirements and in particular the performance analysis of the controller and of the dynamical behaviour of the scaled roller rig when some disturbances are simulated with low adhesion conditions. Since the scaled roller rig will be used to simulate degraded adhesion conditions, accurate and realistic wheel–roller contact model also has to be included in the model. The contact model consists of two parts: the contact point detection and the adhesion model. The first part is based on a numerical method described in some previous studies for the wheel–rail case and modified to simulate the three-dimensional contact between revolute surfaces (wheel–roller). The second part consists in the evaluation of the contact forces by means of the Hertz theory for the normal problem and the Kalker theory for the tangential problem. Some numerical tests were performed, in particular low adhesion conditions were simulated, and bogie hunting and dynamical imbalance of the wheelsets were introduced. The tests were devoted to verify the robustness of control system with respect to some of the more frequent disturbances that may influence the roller rig dynamics. In particular we verified that the wheelset imbalance could significantly influence system performance, and to reduce the effect of this disturbance a multistate filter was designed.

Keywords:

• scaled roller-rig multi-body model
• three-dimensional wheel–roller contact
• adaptive filtering

Notes

These conditions could be replaced by the orthogonality condition between the tangent plane to the roller surface in and and the orthogonality condition between the tangent plane to the wheel surface in and . In this case, this formulation turns out to be analytically more complicated than the previous one and therefore it has not been employed.