Keywords: condition monitoring, light rail vehicle, tramway, suspension wear, vehicle dynamics, numerical simulation.

Condition monitoring and fault detection systems are now becoming increasingly important in rail vehicles maintenance and operation, ensuring safety and reliability improvement. Light rail vehicles (LRV) are not the main target for this trend, because of their low operation speed and lower safety factors. Nevertheless public transport operators begin to pay a closer attention to the technical state monitoring of tramways, in order to reduce maintenance cost and also increase safety and ride comfort for passengers.

The on-line monitoring of vehicle suspension, including problems of fault detection and identifications belong to the most complicated problems of monitoring. Those problems were considered by many authors, [1,2,3,4] and typical presented procedures of monitoring suspension defects are connected with the transmittance analysis of measurements made for every suspension element.

This paper describes the assumptions and simulation basics of the condition monitoring for light rail vehicle suspension. It discusses the main objective of this work and the methodology used for computer simulations and experimental verification of the monitoring algorithms. The general concept of the assumed diagnosis of vehicle state monitoring is based on comparing the signals of carbody and bogie frame accelerations measured during the ride over the track section having equivalent irregularities.

To better understand the influence on the vehicle dynamic response on the selected suspension failures, a number of numerical models of the typical light rail vehicles were built using a number of different simulation software. Many simulations were made, in order to determine suitable measures for each selected vehicle fault including suspension wear. These defects are modelled as the deviations of the suspension elements stiffness or damping parameters from their nominal values.

To verify all proposed monitoring procedures and selected algorithms, many experimental tests were performed on the real vehicle, using suspension elements with various values of wear index.

1

R.M. Goodall, C. Roberts, "Concepts and Techniques for Railway Condition Monitoring", The International Conference on Railway Condition Monitoring, 90-95, 2006. doi:10.1049/ic:20060050

2

P. Li, R.M. Goodall, P. Weston, C.S. Ling, C. Goodman, C. Roberts, "Estimation of Railway Vehicle Suspension Parameters for Condition Monitoring", Control Engineering Practice, 15, 43-55, 2007. doi:10.1016/j.conengprac.2006.02.021

3

Y. Hayashi, H. Tsunashima, Y. Marumo, "Fault Detection of Railway Vehicle Suspension Systems Using Multiple-Model Approach", Journal of Mechanical Systems for Transportation and Logistics, 1(1), 88-99, 2008. doi:10.1299/jmtl.1.88

4

T.X. Mei, X.J. Ding, "A Model-Less Technique for the Fault Detection of Rail Vehicle Suspensions", Vehicle System Dynamics, 46, Supplement, 277-287, 2008. doi:10.1080/00423110801939154

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