Field Testing and Instrumentation of Railway Vehicles

An understanding of testing and instrumentation methods is essential to the accurate construction and validation of railway vehicle dynamic models. The dynamics engineer may need to produce specifications for test work, understand the applicability and limitations of data produced, and manipulate test results to provide comparisons with modelling work. This chapter provides an overview of the situations in which the engineer may require test data, together with an introduction to common techniques and equipment used, both in the laboratory and for conducting vehicle testing on-track. The examples given largely relate to vehicle testing which forms the most relevant body of work for the vehicle dynamics engineer. However, dynamic simulation is increasingly used in rail/track related investigations where many of the same techniques may be applied.