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The benefits of mechatronically-guided railway vehicles: A multi-body physics simulation study

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journal contribution
posted on 2018-04-13, 08:17 authored by Nabilah Farhat, Christopher Ward, Roger Goodall, Roger Dixon
Mechatronically-guided railway vehicles are of paramount importance in addressing the increasing interest in reducing wheel-rail wear and improving guidance and steering. Conventional passively-guided rail vehicles are limited by the mechanical constraints of the suspension elements. Currently, a typical rail vehicle suspension needs to be sufficiently stiff to stabilize the wheelsets while being complaint enough to negotiate curved track profiles. The suspension is therefore a compromise for the contradictory requirements of curving and stability. In mechatronic vehicles, actuators are used with the conventional suspension components to provide additional stiffness or damping forces needed to optimise a vehicle for a wide variety of scenarios, and not rely on a sub optimal combination of passive components. This research demonstrates the benefits of active guidance and steering when compared to a conventional vehicle using simulation results from a multi-body simulation software Simpack. It also provides insights into the relative performance of the mechatronic schemes. The Simpack modeling allows for a complex model with high fidelity, which provides an additional level of proof of the control algorithms working on a real rail vehicle. Each vehicle is assessed in terms of guidance on straight track, steering on curved track, actuation requirements and wheel-rail wear. Significant benefits are demonstrated in one of the guided vehicles with independently-rotating wheelsets.

Funding

The research has been supported by a Loughborough University studentship and European Unions Horizon 2020: the Framework Programme for Research and Innovation (2014–2020) through grant number 635900 for the project IN2RAIL: Innovative Intelligent Rail.

History

School

  • Mechanical, Electrical and Manufacturing Engineering

Published in

Mechatronics

Volume

51

Pages

115 - 126

Citation

FARHAT, N. ... et al., 2018. The benefits of mechatronically-guided railway vehicles: A multi-body physics simulation study. Mechatronics, 51, pp. 115-126.

Publisher

© The authors. Published by Elsevier

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/

Acceptance date

2018-03-15

Publication date

2018

Notes

This is an Open Access Article. It is published by Elsevier under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported Licence (CC BY). Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

ISSN

0957-4158

Language

  • en