Alemi Alireza, Corman Francesco, Pang Yusong, Lodewijks Gabriel
Faculty of Mechanical, Maritime and Material Engineering (3mE), Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands.
Institute for Transport planning and Systems, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland.
Proc Inst Mech Eng F J Rail Rapid Transit. 2019 Jan;233(1):49-62. doi: 10.1177/0954409718784362. Epub 2018 Jul 4.
Wheel impact load detectors are widespread railway systems used for measuring the wheel-rail contact force. They usually measure the rail strain and convert it to force in order to detect high impact forces and corresponding detrimental wheels. The measured strain signal can also be used to identify the defect type and its severity. The strain sensors have a limited effective zone that leads to partial observation from the wheels. Therefore, wheel impact load detectors exploit multiple sensors to collect samples from different portions of the wheels. The discrete measurement by multiple sensors provides the magnitude of the force; however, it does not provide the much richer variation pattern of the contact force signal. Therefore, this paper proposes a fusion method to associate the collected samples to their positions over the wheel circumferential coordinate. This process reconstructs an informative signal from the discrete samples collected by multiple sensors. To validate the proposed method, the multiple sensors have been simulated by an ad hoc multibody dynamic software (VI-Rail), and the outputs have been fed to the fusion model. The reconstructed signal represents the contact force and consequently the wheel defect. The obtained results demonstrate considerable similarity between the contact force and the reconstructed defect signal that can be used for further defect identification.
车轮冲击载荷探测器是广泛应用于铁路系统的用于测量轮轨接触力的设备。它们通常测量钢轨应变并将其转换为力，以便检测高冲击力和相应的有害车轮。测量得到的应变信号还可用于识别缺陷类型及其严重程度。应变传感器的有效区域有限，这导致只能从车轮的部分区域进行观测。因此，车轮冲击载荷探测器利用多个传感器从车轮的不同部位采集样本。多个传感器的离散测量提供了力的大小；然而，它并没有提供接触力信号更丰富的变化模式。因此，本文提出一种融合方法，将采集到的样本与其在车轮圆周坐标上的位置相关联。这个过程从多个传感器采集的离散样本中重建出一个信息丰富的信号。为了验证所提出的方法，通过一个专门的多体动力学软件（VI-Rail）对多个传感器进行了模拟，并将输出结果输入到融合模型中。重建信号代表接触力，进而代表车轮缺陷。所得结果表明接触力与重建的缺陷信号之间有相当大的相似性，可用于进一步的缺陷识别。
