Observer design for a railway running gear with independently rotating wheels

Abstract

The German Aerospace Center (DLR) bundles its railway research in the long-term project "Next Generation Train" (NGT). The NGT is a high speed train concept in light-weight design and double-deck configuration. To reduce wheel and rail wear and to enhance the passenger capacity, a mechatronic running gear with independently rotating wheels (IRW) is designed. This configuration requires an advanced control of the lateral dynamics in order to fully exploit the potential in minimizing wear and noise. In terms of a model-based control design, the controller performance highly depends on the estimated lateral position of the running gear relative to the track. In a practical environment it is difficult to directly measure this displacement of the wheel-pair. Therefore this article deals with the question which sensor configuration enables an appropriate estimation of the lateral displacement and is suitable for observer design. Hence, an observability analysis and an observer synthesis to estimate the lateral position for the nonlinear system of the 1:5 scaled hardware running gear is carried out. For validation purposes three estimators are implemented at the real-time environment of the testbed and the estimation errors of the observer configurations are compared.