Railway Wheel Flat Detection System Based on a Parallelogram Mechanism

Wheel flats are a key fault in railway systems, which can bring great harm to vehicle operation safety. At present, most wheel flat detection methods use qualitative detection and do not meet practical demands. In this paper, we used a railway wheel flat measurement method based on a parallelogram mechanism to detect wheel flats dynamically and quantitatively. Based on our experiments, we found that system performance was influenced by the train speed. When the train speed was higher than a certain threshold, the wheel impact force would cause vibration of the measuring mechanism and affect the detection accuracy. Since the measuring system was installed at the on-site entrance of the train garage, to meet the speed requirement, a three-dimensional simulation model was established, which was based on the rigid-flexible coupled multibody dynamics theory. The speed threshold of the measuring mechanism increased by the reasonable selection of the damping coefficients of the hydraulic damper, the measuring positions, and the downward displacements of the measuring ruler. Finally, we applied the selected model parameters to the parallelogram mechanism, where field measurements showed that the experimental results were consistent with the simulation results.