Spectral Distribution of Derailment Coefficient in Non-Linear Model of Railway Vehicle–Track System With Random Track Irregularities

Author(s):  
Ewa Kardas-Cinal

Improving the running safety and reducing the risk of derailments are the key objectives in the assessment of the running characteristics of railway vehicles. The present study of the safety against derailment is focused on the effect of wheelset hunting on the derailment coefficient Y/Q and, especially, how it is reflected in the power spectral density (PSD) of Y/Q. The lateral Y and vertical Q forces at the wheel/rail contact are obtained in numerical simulations for a four-axle railway vehicle moving at a constant velocity along a tangent track with random geometrical irregularities. The PSD of Y/Q, calculated as a function of spatial frequency, is found to have a characteristic structure with three peaks for the leading wheelsets and one peak for the trailing wheelsets of the front and rear bogies. The positions of the PSD maxima remain unchanged with increasing ride velocity, while their magnitudes and shapes evolve. One of the PSD peaks occurs for all wheelsets at the same spatial frequency corresponding to the wheelset hunting, while an additional peak at the double hunting frequency is found for the leading wheelsets. Such a peak structure is also found in the PSD of Y/Q determined in simulations with modified parameters of the vehicle primary suspension and for different track sections. The peak at the double hunting frequency is shown, by a detailed analysis of the contact forces, the flange angles and their PSDs, to result from the nonlinear geometry of the wheel/rail contact leading to the second-harmonic term in Y/Q. The emergence of this peak is also closely related to the phase difference between the hunting oscillations of the wheelset lateral displacement and the oscillations of its yaw angle, for which the difference is significantly smaller for the leading wheelset than for the trailing one. Finally, the effect of wheelset hunting is also shown to manifest itself in the strong dependence of the running average of Y/Q, which is used in the railway technical safety standards for the assessment of the safety against derailment (with the Nadal criterion), on the applied window width.

Author(s):  
Van Tan Vu ◽  
Van Da Tran ◽  
Manh Hung Truong ◽  
Oliver Sename ◽  
Peter Gaspar

The complexity of railway vehicle structures has been part of an evolutionary process for almost two hundred years. Challenges such as increased weight, increased maintenance, higher costs and energy consumption have become common. The vision for future railway vehicles is to reduce complexity, hence enable simpler structures and reduce maintenance and cost, and of course various research challenges arise from this. In fact, a number of papers in the railway engineering literature have presented practical ways to control steering of railway vehicles to improve performance. The model of the railway wheelset is highly nonlinear, mainly due to the nature of the wheelset structure and the related wheel-rail contact forces involved during operation. In this paper, the simplest design in terms of retrofitting, the actuated solid-axle wheelset is considered, we investigate actively controlled wheelsets from a Linear Parameter Varying (LPV) control aspect. We use the grid-based LPV approach to synthesize the H∞ / LPV controller, which is self-scheduled by the forward velocity, as well as the longitudinal and lateral creep coefficients. The aim of the controller is to reduce the lateral displacement and yaw angle of the wheelset. Simulation results show that the proposed controller ensures the achievement of the above targets in the considered frequency domain up to 100 rad/s.


Author(s):  
Seyed Milad Mousavi Bideleh ◽  
Viktor Berbyuk

Ride comfort, safety, wear and vehicle speed are the most important factors in evaluating the efficiency of railway transportation. In order to decrease the track access charges it is often desirable to run the vehicle at maximum allowed speed, while keeping an admissible amount of wear in system. This usually deteriorates the ride comfort and safety level during the operation. Therefore, an optimization problem to find a tradeoff value for vehicle speed and design parameters is inevitable. Since, ride comfort, safety and wear values are sensitive to primary and secondary suspensions’ damping parameters it is desirable to find the optimum values of such design variables. In this regard, the multiobjective optimization of railway vehicle dampers is considered to increase the cost-efficiency of railway operation. One car vehicle model with 26 degrees of freedom (DOF) along with a set of initial states, design parameters and operational conditions is explored here. All bodies are assumed to be rigid. Vehicle carbody and bogie frames supposed to have the full set of DOF in space. While, only lateral and yaw motions are considered for each wheelset. It is also assumed that wheelset roll angle is a function of the lateral displacement. Primary and secondary suspensions compromised of parallel linear springs and dampers in longitudinal, vertical and lateral directions which connect wheelsets to bogie frames, and bogie frames to carbody, respectively. Lagrange formalism is employed to obtain the system’s equations of motion. The nonlinear heuristic theory is chosen to relate creepages and the corresponding creep contact forces. The dynamic response of the system is obtained for different operational scenarios including ideal and imperfect tangent and curved tracks. Series-based functions are chosen to approximate the harmonic lateral track irregularities. Accelerations at carbody level, shift forces and wear number are used to evaluate the ride comfort, safety and wear, respectively. MATLAB genetic algorithm optimization routine is applied to perform the optimization. The Pareto sets and Pareto fronts obtained from this study provide the vectors of optimal design parameters corresponding to maximum admissible vehicle speed and guarantee the best tradeoff values for safety and comfort with threshold on wear for each operational scenario. Analysis of the obtained results gives insight into multiobjective optimized dynamic response of a railway vehicle and useful hints for designing adaptive bogie systems with the possibility to switch between optimal damping parameters value and provide the best operational efficiency.


Author(s):  
Lei Yu ◽  
Zhihua Zhao ◽  
Gexue Ren

In this paper, a multibody dynamic model is established to simulate the dynamics and control of moving web with its guiding system, where the term moving web is used to describe thin materials, which are manufactured and processed in a continuous, flexible strip form. In contrast with available researches based on Eulerian description and beam assumption, webs are described by Lagrangian formulation with the absolute nodal coordinate formulation (ANCF) plate element, which is based on Kirchhoff’s assumptions that material normals to the original reference surface remain straight and normal to the deformed reference surface, and the nonlinear elasticity theory that accounts for large displacement, large rotation, and large deformation. The rollers and guiding mechanism are modeled as rigid bodies. The distributed frictional contact forces between rollers and web are considered by Hertz contact model and are evaluated by Gauss quadrature. The proportional integral (PI) control law for web guiding is also embedded in the multibody model. A series of simulations on a typical web-guide system is carried out using the multibody dynamics approach for web guiding system presented in this study. System dynamical information, for example, lateral displacement, stress distribution, and driving moment for web guiding, are obtained from simulations. Parameter sensitivity analysis illustrates the effect of influence variables and effectiveness of the PI control law for lateral movement control of web that are verified under different gains. The present Lagrangian formulation of web element, i.e., ANCF element, is not only capable of describing the large movement and deformation but also easily adapted to capture the distributed contact forces between web and rollers. The dynamical behavior of the moving web can be accurately described by a small number of ANCF thin plate elements. Simulations carried out in this paper show that the present approach is an effective method to assess the design of web guiding system with easily available desktop computers.


Author(s):  
Tat Loon Chng ◽  
David Z. Pai ◽  
Olivier Guaitella ◽  
Svetlana M Starikovskaia ◽  
Anne Bourdon

Abstract Electric field induced second harmonic (E-FISH) generation has emerged as a versatile tool for measuring absolute electric field strengths in time-varying, non-equilibrium plasmas and gas discharges. Yet recent work has demonstrated that the E-FISH signal, when produced with tightly focused laser beams, exhibits a strong dependence on both the length and shape of the applied electric field profile (along the axis of laser beam propagation). In this paper, we examine the effect of this dependence more meaningfully, by predicting what an E-FISH experiment would measure in a plasma, using 2D axisymmetric numerical fluid simulations as the true value. A pin-plane nanosecond discharge at atmospheric pressure is adopted as the test configuration, and the electric field evolution during the propagation of the ionization wave (IW) is specifically analyzed. We find that the various phases of this evolution (before and up to the front arrival, immediately behind the front and after the connection to the grounded plane) are quite accurately described by three unique electric field profile shapes, each of which produces a different response in the E-FISH signal. As a result, the accuracy of an E-FISH measurement is generally predicted to be comparable in the first and third phases of the IW evolution, and significantly poorer in the second (intermediate) phase. Fortunately, even though the absolute error in the field strength at certain time instants could be large, the overall shape of the field evolution curve is relatively well captured by E-FISH. Guided by the simulation results, we propose a procedure for estimating the error in the initial phase of the IW development, based on the presumption that the starting field profile mirrors that of its corresponding Laplacian conditions before evolving further. We expect that this approach may be readily generalized and applicable to other IW problems or phenomena, thus extending the utility of the E-FISH diagnostic.


Author(s):  
Yung-Chang Cheng ◽  
Sen-Yung Lee

A new dynamic model of railway vehicle moving on curved tracks is proposed. In this new model, the motion of the car body is considered and the motion of the tuck frame is not restricted by a virtual boundary. Based on the heuristic nonlinear creep model, the nonlinear coupled differential equations of the motion of a fourteen degrees of freedom car system, considering the lateral displacement and the yaw angle of the each wheelset, the truck frame and the car body, moving on curved tracks are derived in completeness. To illustrate the accuracy of the analysis, the limiting cases are examined. In addition, the influences of the suspension parameters on the critical hunting speeds evaluated via the linear and the nonlinear creep models respectively are studied. Furthermore, the influences of the suspension parameters on the critical hunting speeds evaluated via the fourteen degrees of freedom car system and the six degrees of freedom truck system, which the motion of the tuck frame is restricted by a virtual boundary, are compared.


1973 ◽  
Vol 95 (1) ◽  
pp. 28-35 ◽  
Author(s):  
E. Harry Law ◽  
R. S. Brand

The nonlinear equations of motion for a railway vehicle wheelset having curved wheel profiles and wheel-flange/rail contact are presented. The dependence of axle roll and vertical displacement on lateral displacement and yaw is formulated by two holonomic constraint equations. The method of Krylov-Bogoliubov is used to derive expressions for the amplitudes of stationary oscillations. A perturbation analysis is then used to derive conditions for the stability characteristics of the stationary oscillations. The expressions for the amplitude and the stability conditions are shown to have a simple geometrical interpretation which facilitates the evaluation of the effects of design parameters on the motion. It is shown that flange clearance and the nonlinear variation of axle roll with lateral displacement significantly influence the motion of the wheelset. Stationary oscillations may occur at forward speeds both below and above the critical speed at which a linear analysis predicts the onset of instability.


2013 ◽  
Vol 392 ◽  
pp. 156-160
Author(s):  
Ju Seok Kang

Multibody dynamics analysis is advantageous in that it uses real dimensions and design parameters. In this study, the stability analysis of a railway vehicle based on multibody dynamics analysis is presented. The equations for the contact points and contact forces between the wheel and the rail are derived using a wheelset model. The dynamics equations of the wheelset are combined with the dynamics equations of the other parts of the railway vehicle, which are obtained by general multibody dynamics analysis. The equations of motion of the railway vehicle are linearized by using the perturbation method. The eigenvalues of these linear dynamics equations are calculated and the critical speed is found.


2016 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 565-581 ◽  
Author(s):  
Qing Wu ◽  
Yan Sun ◽  
Maksym Spiryagin ◽  
Colin Cole

Wedge suspensions are critical systems for three-piece bogies. This paper proposes a methodology to optimize wedge suspensions using white-box suspension models, dynamic simulations of railway vehicle systems, parallel multi-objective Particle Swarm Optimization (pMOPSO), and parallel multi-objective Genetic Algorithm (pMOGA). Two types of original wedge suspensions with three different toe angle configurations were modeled and compared. Four case studies were carried out to prove the feasibility of the optimization methodology. A series of optimized designs were identified using the Pareto Front technique. Demonstrative optimized designs were compared with the original designs. Results show that wedge suspensions with the toe-in configuration provide better dynamic performance for freight wagons. Significant reductions to the maximum wheel/rail contact forces can be achieved by the optimized designs. Linear speed-up was achieved by using the parallel computing technique.


Author(s):  
Yung-Chang Cheng

A non-linear creep model that considers non-constant creep coefficients that vary as a function of vehicle speed is derived using Hertz contact theory, Kalker’s linear theory and a heuristic non-linear creep model. The proposed model is created by modifying the heuristic non-linear creep model by adding a linear creep moment and the semi-axis lengths in the non-linearity of the saturation constant. In this paper, the vehicle is modeled by a system with 28 degrees of freedom, taking into consideration the lateral displacement, vertical displacement, roll angle and yaw angle of each wheelset, the truck frames and car body. To analyze the respective effects of the major system parameters on the vehicle dynamics, the 28 degree-of-freedom (DOF) system is reduced to a 25-DOF model, by excluding designated subsets of the system parameters. The accuracy of the present analysis is verified by comparing a six-DOF system and the current numerical results with results in the literature. The effects of suspension parameters of a vehicle on the critical hunting speeds evaluated by the currently proposed model, the traditional non-linear creep model and the linear creep model are illustrated. In most cases, the obtained results show that the critical hunting speed evaluated using the new non-linear creep model is greater than that derived using the traditional non-linear creep model. Additionally, the critical hunting speed evaluated using the linear creep model is higher than that evaluated using the currently proposed non-linear creep model.


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