Detection of low adhesion in the railway vehicle wheel/rail interface: assessment of multi-bodied simulation data

Low adhesion in the wheel/rail interface of railway vehicles creates safety and punctuality issues in terms of missed station stops and signals passed at danger. RSSB project T959 is tasked with developing advanced monitoring techniques for the detection of adhesion in this key interface. A number of techniques were developed and initially tested on simplified models of a rail vehicle. The efficacy of these techniques is now being tested with more representative data produced by multi-bodied physics simulation package Vampire. This paper therefore covers the outcomes of the Vampire testing, initial application of a Kalman-Bucy filter creep force estimator to the Vampire data, and application of a data comparison method based upon the Sprague and Geers method, also to the Vampire data.