Towards Prognostic and Health Management of Train Wheels in the Chinese Railway Industry

Abstract

Condition-based maintenance is a more advanced maintenance strategy, owing to reducing inspection and maintenance costs and improving the reliability of targeted assets. The maintenance strategies in the Chinese Railway industry are transforming from plan-based to condition-based, which has heightened the need for the completion of relevant research. This study proposes an experience-based health status evaluation method for train wheels, which considers factors in the wheel manufacturing process, operational process and maintenance process. The manufacturing factors are indicated by material properties and press-fitting influence factor, while operational and maintenance factors are indicated by wheel diameter and damages. Based on the health evaluation values, a decision-making function is constructed to divide wheels into four categories: fine, attention, pre-alarm and scrapped. Finally, the PHM + Wheel system is developed based on the proposed health evaluation method to provide support for maintenance strategy. The PHM + Wheel system has been practically applied to the Chinese Railway industry with adequate feedback received. INDEX TERMS Prognostic and health management, train wheels, health status evaluation, prognostics.

Joint Maintenance Strategy Optimization for Railway Bogie Wheelset

“…Additionally, maintenance measures are developed by researching wheelset status evaluations. A data-driven evaluation model and an experience-based evaluation method for wheelsets support the maintenance decision [21,22]. The method can consider the wheelset status comprehensively.…”

Train Wheel Degradation Modeling and Remaining Useful Life Prediction Based on Mixed Effect Model Considering Dependent Measurement Errors

“…In China, the maintenance cost of rail vehicles accounts for about 66%-88% of the total life cycle cost of the vehicle. Prognostic and health management (PHM), as an emerging maintenance framework, has been adopted by many engineering practices including train wheel [3]. One of the key problems of PHM is predicting the remaining useful life (RUL) of the equipment (or component) through the data obtained from monitoring [4], [5].…”