A Constrained Nonlinear Approach for Monitoring the Railway Anti-yaw Damping

Abstract

In railway vehicles, the secondary anti-yaw suspension system is subjected to degradation so that it must undergo maintenance. In order to optimize the maintenance costs and to improve the safety, model-based real-time monitoring techniques are used. This paper presents a constrained nonlinear estimation procedure to monitor the anti-yaw damping through a railway vehicle model with a wheel-rail contact model characterized by a random walk approach. The application of state constraints allows to reduce the parameter variation sensitiveness. This technique considers the constraints applied to the estimated states and is advantageous in terms of unsensitiveness linked to the phenomenon of wheel-rail contact and a no prior knowledge of the track irregularities is required.