Design of a Scaled Roller-Rig Test Bench for Anti-Slip Control Development for Railway Traction

Anti-slip control is a prominent part of modern railway traction control systems due both to performance and safety concerns. This paper explains the development of a scaled roller-rig test bench which emulates the rail and the wheel of a train. The final purpose of the developed roller-rig test bench is twofold: to study the theory/behaviour of existing anti-slip strategies and to test new designs, before their implementation in the real system. Estimation of adhesion coefficient using a disturbance observer method is explained and tested under various conditions. Anti-slip control is implemented in wheel drive using a direct method by adding a slip speed controller. The tests are conducted using both fixed roller speed and variable roller speed, i.e. dynamic roller. In this second case, train inertia emulation will be key. Two methods are proposed to emulate train inertia, being this the main contribution of this paper. Both methods are verified in simulation first, and further confirmed experimentally in the test bench.