A novel measuring system for high-speed railway vehicles hunting monitoring able to predict wheelset motion and wheel/rail contact characteristics

This paper describes a measuring system for hunting monitoring which considers the real-time wheel/rail contact relationships of high-speed railway vehicles during violent hunting motions. The proposed monitoring system relies on signal-based techniques and is able to predict the wheelset lateral displacement and yaw angle as well as the wheel/rail contact relationships in an efficient, effective and low-cost way. The Hankel matrix-based singular value decomposition (SVD) method is applied for the prediction by using the sensor-collected bogie lateral accelerations as inputs. To achieve real-time performances, the look-up table (LUT) method is used to carry out the wheel/rail contact analysis. The accuracy and efficiency of the proposed method have been validated by comparisons of the predicted results with simulated and experimental results. Finally, the critical values are corrected based on the comparison results.