Robust active guidance control using the µ-synthesis method for a tramcar with independently rotating wheelsets

Abstract

This paper presents a robust active guidance controller that uses the µ-synthesis method to improve the ability of guidance and to reduce the wheel–rail wear under the consideration of system nonlinearity, parameter uncertainty, and measurement noise in tramcars with independently rotating wheelsets (IRWs). Each wheel of the tramcar is connected to a sider motor, and the active yaw moment is generated by the torque differences between the left and right wheels in the same axle. To achieve local control, the wheel–rail force and the primary suspension force are considered as external disturbances, and the IRW state–space model is modeled independent of the tramcar system. The effectiveness of the controller is mainly verified by the cosimulation method: the dynamic model of the tramcar is established in SIMPACK, and the controller model is established in MATLAB. The simulation results show that compared with the passive case, for the actual tramcar, the control method can improve the vehicle's running performance and can significantly reduce the wheel–rail wear in both straight and curved tracks. A 1:5 scaled tramcar model is used for the active guidance experiment to further verify the effectiveness of the algorithm.

Active suspension in railway vehicles: a literature survey

“…A robust control approach was successfully applied on a 1:5 test rig by Lu et al [142]. The scaled vehicle runs on a real track with reduced gauge differently from most of the applications that involve tests on experimental IRW vehicles.…”

“…These are then used to provide traction, wheel guidance and stability control. The motors can be externally mounted and connected to the wheelset through a gearbox (Pérez et al [137], Liang et al [139,140], Ahn et al [141], Lu et al [142] and Farhat et al [98,143]) as shown in Fig. 30 or embedded inside the wheels (Mei et al [144], Ji et al [145] and in the 'Next Generation Train' project in [124], [146][147][148][149]).…”

“…The information of the leading bogie is used for an advanced control of the trailing one, leading to a further improvement in terms of wear number. Using the lateral displacement and the yaw angle of the IRW wheelset as feedback, Lu et al [142] developed a robust torque control using l-synthesis. To reduce the complexity of the model, the control is based only on the model of the IRW wheelset using the bogie force and torque as external inputs.…”

“…1:5 scaled test rig for high-depth subway system[141] Fig. 34 A 1:5 scaled vehicle on scaled track[142] …”

Hardware-in-the-Loop Simulation for Active Control of Tramcars With Independently Rotating Wheels

“…A study on the assessment stability and active guidance of railway vehicles was conducted by Goodall and Powell [16], [17]. Lu et al studied a robust active controller to handle the uncertainty and nonlinear characteristics [18].…”