Signal processing procedure based on frequency analysis for extracting information of contact position from instrumented wheelset utilizing bending and / or shear strains

Abstract

Instrumented wheelsets are widely used in the railway industry for the purpose of measurement of the wheel-rail interaction forces, which are crucial factors in a running safety assessment. Information on lateral contact position between wheel and rail is also an important factor when discussing the wheel-rail contact condisions, such as the friction coefficient at the contact point. However, it is difficult to measure the contact position by using ordinary instrumented wheelsets since they are specialized only for the measurement of interaction forces. Although some configurations of the instrumneted wheelset have been proposed for the measurement of the contact position, those methods require some additional bridge circuits specilized for the contact position measurement. This paper proposes three types of signal processing procedure to extract the information of the contact position from a configuration of bridge circuits constructed for the measurement of the lateral forces between wheel and rail.