Investigation on the characterisation of axle box resonance characteristics to wheel excitation

A growing number of studies have demonstrated the effectiveness and superiority of reverse engineering in using axle box vibration acceleration signals to deduce the operation state of wheelsets. However, there is a lack of discussion and summary on the overall mapping relationship between wheel excitation and axle box response, and there has been no detailed investigation on resonance characteristics of axle box. To address the deficiency, a novel resonant excitation loading method is proposed, which is applied to the vehicle model with flexible wheelset and axle box. Amplitude frequency response (AFR) curve of the resonance characteristics of axle box is obtained. AFR is used to characterise the characteristics of various excitation states of wheel, including wheel polygon, wheel tread flat, and wheel-rail separation state, and the corresponding evolution law is revealed. Finally, through two case studies, the guiding role of axle box resonance characteristics on wheel operation status detection is discussed in detail. Analyses show that mastering the resonance characteristics of axle box is an effective way to deduce the operation status of wheel based on the complex axle box vibration response signal, and it will provide a basis for the quantitative evaluation of wheel local damage.