Torsional Vibration Suppression in Railway Traction Drives

Abstract

Torsional vibrations phenomena are self-excited vibrations that occur in the wheelset of railway powertrains due to the counter-phase oscillation of both wheels. Long-lasting events of this type may lead to the catastrophic failures. Therefore, torsional vibration suppression and mitigation methods have drawn significant attention from the railway industry in the recent few years. Conventional vibration suppression methods reduce motor torque once the oscillation is detected. However, this can result in trip delays. Design of methods which do not compromise the traction capability is challenging. This paper proposes a novel torsional vibration suppression method using a Proportional-Resonant (PR) controller. The proposed method is insensitive to mechanical drive-train parameter variation neither requires adding new sensors to the wheelset. The method requires previous knowledge of the natural frequency of the wheelset torsional mode but this significantly reduces the implementation complexity suffered by other anti-vibration methods. Furthermore, the method will be shown to provide reduced sensitivity to slip velocities and wheelrail conditions.INDEX TERMS Railway traction drives, torsional vibrations, slip-stick phenomenon, slip control, fieldoriented control, proportional-resonant controller.

Co-Simulation-Based Verification of Torsional Vibration Protection of Electric-Driven Railway Vehicle Wheelsets

“…As the resulting oscillation amplitudes of the wheelset have a similar magnitude as the oscillation amplitudes of the rotor, chatter oscillations are detectable by the traction motor sensors. As a result, they can actively be damped by an appropriate design of the traction control [14,25]. This is different in mode 3, which is the relevant mode of torsional vibration.…”

“…In this paper, passive readhesion control is used to limit the slip velocity, being aware of its adverse impact on traction. Alternatively, advanced control techniques can be employed to actively damp the torsional vibrations in the traction drive, but at the cost of higher complexity and parameter dependency [20,25].…”

A Methodology for High-Power Drives Emulation Using a Back-to-Back Configuration

“…In those cases, the same fundamental current magnitude can be guaranteed, the harmonic content of the current being less relevant. This is not the case for synchronous modulation techniques used in high-power drives that operate with very low switching-to-fundamental frequency ratios [21,26] where switching harmonics occur at relatively low frequencies (5th, 7th, 11th, etc.). In these cases, it is not possible to achieve equal current harmonics and at the same time equal current magnitude as will be demonstrated in this paper.…”

“…Once M EU T ′ , M AU X and α AU X are known, it is straightforward to obtain the harmonic content of EUT and AUX output voltage. The resulting current harmonics are easily obtained using (26).…”

Investigating the stick-slip vibration behavior of a locomotive with adhesion control in a curve

“…At present, the adhesion control method is often used in railway transportation to realize the utilization of high adhesion of wheel-rail, Common adhesion control methods such as combination correction method, 17,18 PID control and fuzzy control, 19 sliding mode control, 20 and artificial neural network method, 21 particle swarm optimization method. 22 A co-simulation model was established by Spiryagin et al 23,24 including the locomotive traction system and locomotive dynamics system, which based on a TCP/IP data exchange interface to analyze the performance of the locomotive traction control system and the train dynamics, offering guidance for large-scale train marshaling operations. A co-simulation model of the locomotive electric drive subsystem and the vehicle-track mechanical subsystem was established by Zhou et al 25 to analyze the dynamic response under complex excitations, such as time-varying gear mesh stiffness and track irregularity.…”