Study of Practical Structure of Slip Ring Device with Built-in Amplifier for the Purpose of Increasing Measurement Channels of Instrumented Wheelset

Instrumented wheelsets are widely used in the railway industry for the purpose of measurement of wheel-rail interaction forces. Those forces are fundamental quantities in the context of running safety assessments of railway vehicles. Aiming the accuracy improvement of the measurement, authors proposed new measuring method in which shear strain is dealt with a scale of lateral interaction force. Meanwhile, a new configuration of bridge circuit for the new method is developed where more channel is required to implement the signal transfer. To achieve more signal transfer, principle of new slip ring device with built-in amplifiers was invented in the previous study. With anticipating the practical use, actual structure of the slip-ring device with built-in amplifiers is developed in this study. Basic vibration characteristic tests of the device are also introduced in this paper.