A novel active adhesion control design for high speed trains without vehicle speed measurement

Adhesion control is a key technology for preventing or reducing wheel slip/skid and improving reliability of traction/braking systems of railway vehicles. With the running speed and operation span of trains increasing, the issue of wheel-rail adhesion becomes rather complex, making traditional re-adhesion based adhesion control strategy inapplicable for HST. This work proposes a novel active adhesion control strategy using observer based robust approach. It is shown that the developed method is able to instantly prevent wheel skid and sufficiently utilize available adhesion coefficient as the actual adhesion coefficient suddenly decreases. Furthermore, in contrast to traditional adhesion control, detecting actual adhesion condition and measurement of vehicle speed are not needed with the proposed method. Both theoretical analysis and simulation study verify the effectiveness of the proposed strategy.