Improved Wheelset Speed Implementation of a Brake HILS System for a Railway Vehicle

The hardware-in-the-loop simulation (HILS) of a railway vehicle is crucial for overcoming the limitation of field tests of a railway vehicle. A brake HILS system for a railway vehicle was previously not able to test the performance of a speed-sensing system of a railway vehicle, since wheelset speeds were generated only by computer simulations. In this paper, we present a novel wheelset speed implementation of a brake HILS system for a railway vehicle. Four wheelset speeds of a brake HILS system for a car of a railway vehicle are implemented using four small-sized servomotors, whereas the speed sensors and pole wheels used in the brake HILS system are the actual ones of the railway vehicle. According to the simulated speeds of four wheelsets in the dynamic equations of motion, four servomotors generate wheel speeds in real time, and then the measured wheelset speeds are fed back to the computer simulation model. Moreover, in this paper, we improve the performance of wheelset speed measurement via the T method instead of the M method presently used in the field. The performances of wheelset speed implementation and speed-sensor operation are demonstrated by experimental works using a HILS system.