Keywords: railway, polygonal wear, modern spectral estimation, detection.

The contact friction between the railway wheel and track will cause the wheel polygonal wear, then producing the strong quasi-periodic wheel-rail excitation force and accelerating the fatigue failure of critical components and infrastructure. However, the specific generation mechanisms of wheel polygonal wear are still controversial. The timely wheel re-profiling process to the severe polygonal wheel is still the most frequently used solution. Therefore, it is essential to detect the wheels during their service process to provide a real-time wear status for the wheel reprofiling scheme. Nevertheless, the wheel fault signals are usually challenging to be identified by the traditional spectral estimation method, making the order and the level of wheel polygonal wear detected hardly. An on-board dynamic detection method of wheel polygonal wear based on modern power spectral estimation is proposed firstly in this paper. Taking the measured vertical axle-box vibration acceleration signal of a metro vehicle as a case study, the orders of polygonal wear for the studied wheel are clearly detected. And then, compared the proposed method and traditional method, the results show that the detection method can avoid the inherent defects of traditional methods, weaken the interference of random background noise, and is highly advantageous to detecting the polygonal wear of the railway wheel, even the initial wear state. Provide essential theoretical and methodological support for the dynamic detection method of polygonal wear of railway wheel. The actual field tests and the probability density analysis verify its feasibility and effectiveness.

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