Multi Kalman filtering approach for estimation of wheel-rail contact conditions

This paper presents a novel detection technique of wheel-rail contact conditions from the dynamic properties of the railway wheelset. The proposed scheme is an indirect method which avoids difficult and expensive measurement requirements. A nonlinear model of lateral and yaw dynamics of a conventional solid axle wheelset is used for study. The scheme consists of a bank of Kalman filters based on linearized wheelset models that represent different characteristics of typical creep/slip curves. Normalized rms values from the residual of each filter calculated using time moving windows are assessed to identify the operating condition of the wheelset at the interface with the rail surface. Simulation results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.