Mechatronic Strategies for Controlling Railway Wheelsets with Independently Rotating Wheels

This paper presents the development of an active control strategy for the independently rotating wheelset of railway vehicles. The proposed control scheme is intuitively formulated with a simple control structure and adaptive to vehicle speed. It does not require basic guidance measurements (e.g. wheel-rail deflection and angle of attack) that are expensive and impractical to implement. Speed sensors are used to measure the relative rotational speed of the two wheels on a same axle and optional sensors may be used to measure the wheelset yaw velocity relative to the vehicle body. A two-axle vehicle is used in the study. Both curving performance and passenger ride comfort of the actively controlled vehicle are compared with that of a typical passive vehicle and an optimal control scheme.