Citation

Zheng F, Zhang B, Gao R, Feng Q. Sensors (Basel) 2019; 19(19): s19194148.

Affiliation

Key Lab of Luminescence and Optical Information, Ministry of Education, Beijing Jiaotong University, Beijing 100044, China. qbfeng@bjtu.edu.cn.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2019, MDPI: Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute)

DOI

10.3390/s19194148

PMID

31557813

Abstract

Wheel diameter is a significant geometric parameter related to the safe operation of trains, and needs to be measured dynamically. To the best of the authors' knowledge, most existing dynamic measurement methods and systems do not meet the requirement that the wheel diameter measurement error for the high-speed vehicle is less than 0.3 mm. In this paper, a simple method for dynamically and precisely measuring train wheel diameter using three one-dimensional laser displacement transducers (1D-LDTs) is proposed for the first time, and a corresponding measurement system which was developed is described. The factors that affect the measurement accuracy were analyzed. As a main factor, rail deformation caused by the wheel-rail interaction force at low (20 km/h) and high (300 km/h) speeds was determined based on the combination of multi-body dynamics and finite element methods, and the effect of rail deformation on measurement accuracy is greatly reduced by a comparative measurement. Field experiments were performed to verify the performance of the developed measurement system, and the results of the repeatability error and measurement error of the system were both less than 0.3 mm, which meets the requirement of wheel diameter measurements for high-speed vehicles.

Language: en

Keywords

dynamic measurement; laser displacement transducer; multi-body dynamics and finite element methods; structural light vision transducer; train wheel diameter measurement