Field programmable gate array implementation of wheel-rail contact laws

This study presents the development of a field programmable gate array (FPGA)-based accelerator that is highly suited to the implementation of complex and computationally demanding control or real-time simulation tasks. The application studied in this article is for the real-time simulation of wheel-rail contact laws, which may be used for hardware-in-the-loop experimental studies of the latest active control technology for wheelset stabilisation and steering. The complex wheel-rail contact laws are implemented using a single FPGA chip that outperforms substantially modern general-purpose CPU or DSP in the aspects of processing time, configuration flexibility and cost. The algorithms are restructured to utilise the FPGA´s parallel processing capability. Reusable IP core are used for the floating point operations. The scheduling of the operations is optimised to ensure effective and efficient use of the FPGA´s resources.