Application of the real-time wheel-rail contact model in traction control of a heavy haul locomotive

The understanding of adhesion processes at the wheel-rail interface is a key issue for heavy haul operations. Preliminary estimations show that the further improvement in adhesion/traction control by means of the introduction of innovative approaches may lead to in-creasing of locomotive tractive effort by 30 percent and decreasing of slippage occurrences by 20 percent, the latter being particularly important during braking. These improvements impact directly on wheel-rail damage (i.e. maintenance costs), operational safety, reliabil-ity and efficiency of rail transportation. In this paper, a concept of traction control system based on a real time contact model is described which uses a conventional feedback control technique with a proportional integral slip controller. The verification of the proposed ap-proach has been done by means of a co-simulation between the Gensys multibody software package and Simulink, which presents a fully detailed dynamic vehicle model of a heavy haul locomotive and combines this with control modelling. The obtained simulation results confirm that the proposed approach can be recommended for further development of traction control systems of heavy haul locomotives.