Adhesion force estimation on 1/5 scaled test rig

The estimation of adhesion forces for a rail vehicle in tangent and curving parts of track is a very difficult process because it is connected with use of tractive and braking efforts, and also depends on the contact characteristics in the zone between the wheels and rails. For the investigations of the dynamic behavior of a rail vehicle, it is necessary to provide an accurate description of force processes in the contact. The existing methods for the estimationcan be used for the creation traction and braking control systems of running gears of rail vehicles. Recently, some publications describe works on study of adhesion forces. The approaches for the detection of these forces in a real time mode have very much in common. From results of this works, it is possible to see that approaches are based on experimental results and use the short time for calculations of wheel-rail contact forces. In work [1], for the estimationadhesion the fast method developed by Polach [2] is applied, but this approach does not take into account spin and can be used only for the tangent track. In work [3], the estimation is based on the fast method described in [4], but this fast method was obtained for wheel and rail profiles used in CIS countries. In the present work, based on authors’ previous works in this topic [5-8], the algorithm forthe estimation of adhesion forces in the contact is proposed. This paper describes a theoretical and experimental investigation that considers the possibility to detect adhesion forces by means of model based algorithm adapted for the application in a real time mode. A1:5 scaled roller-rig is used in order to provide an experimental validation of the numerical model.