Artificial neural network approach for air brake pushrod stroke prediction in heavy commercial road vehicles

Abstract

In heavy commercial road vehicles, the air brake system is a critical vehicle safety system whose performance degradation increases the risk of accidents and hence requires periodic inspection and maintenance. The wear of brake pad lining and brake drum during operation leads to increase in the stroke of a component called pushrod whose ‘out-of-adjustment’ creates severe brake performance degradation. The fact that the driver does not receive a corresponding tactile feedback till it is too severe adds to the complexity of manual detection. Motivated by the increase in onboard sensing, electronics, and computation capabilities, this study proposes an artificial neural network–based approach to predict pushrod stroke based on measurement of brake chamber pressure. Here, a back propagation algorithm was used to train the multilayer feed-forward network. The effect of excessive pushrod stroke on vehicle braking response was first studied using a Hardware-in-Loop system that consists of brake system hardware and a commercial vehicle dynamics simulation software (IPG TruckMaker®). Experimental data collected from this system with manual slack adjuster and automatic slack adjuster have then been used to train and test the artificial neural network for pushrod stroke prediction. The performance of the prediction scheme has been tested over the entire range of brake operating conditions. The prediction error corresponding to manual slack adjuster was found to be within ±15% in 322 out of the entire test set of 328 instances (98.17%) and automatic slack adjuster within ±8% in all 57 test sets (100%). Statistical analysis based on confidence interval revealed a prediction error between −1.62% and −3.05% for manual slack adjuster and 0.43% and −1.62% for automatic slack adjuster for 99% confidence interval, which demonstrated the efficacy of the proposed prediction scheme.

Learning-based fault diagnosis of air brake system using wheel speed data

“…Heusser 23 developed a method for calculating the deceleration of a heavy truck by considering its brake adjustment. Raveendran et al 24 explained the influence of pushrod stroke on vehicle braking performance. Motivated from the above studies, the effect of reduction in brake torque, due to an increase in pushrod stroke, in terms of vehicle braking distance and yaw stability was analyzed.…”

A Method for Fault Prediction of Air Brake System in Vehicles

“…So the need for developing an intelligent diagnostic scheme to minimize the resources (such as time and cost of maintenance) becomes an urgent research subject currently. Recently, model-based and data-driven approaches are used in fault diagnostic schemes [1][2][3][4]. To inspect the health conditions of air brake system, condition monitoring systems are used to collect real-time data from them, and big data are acquired due to development of the Internet, the internet of things, wireless communications, mobile devices, and smart manufacturing of sensors, so the amount of data collected has grown in an exponential manner which leads the task of fault diagnosis has become increasingly difficult and its complexity almost unmanageable using traditional techniques.…”