A mechanical brake hardware-in-the-loop simulation of a railway vehicle that accounts for hysteresis and pneumatic cylinder dynamics

Abstract

A brake hardware-in-the-loop simulation system for a railway vehicle provides an effective platform for testing the braking performance under various dangerous braking conditions. However, in general, four-brake calipers are required to implement a mechanical brake system for one car. In this article, we implement a brake hardware-in-the-loop simulation system only with one brake caliper and three air tanks accounting for hysteresis and pneumatic cylinder dynamics, ultimately saving installation space and reducing financial budget costs. Since the brake caliper has a high nonlinearity, such as hysteresis resulting from friction and from the precompressed spring of the brake cylinder, we measured the hysteresis of the brake caliper clamping force for a mechanical brake system using loadcells, based on which a mathematical model was constructed for the hysteresis of the clamping force between the brake pad and the disk. Moreover, the pneumatic cylinder dynamics are identified and are implemented in three air tanks, together with hysteresis nonlinearity. The proposed brake hardware-in-the-loop simulation system is applied to the wheel-slide protection simulation of a railway vehicle with an initial speed of 80 km/h and demonstrated experimentally accounting for the hysteresis and brake cylinder dynamics.