Virtual commissioning of a true scale mechatronic bogie test bench

The project Next Generation Train (NGT) is an interdisciplinary approach of researchers from several institutes of the German Aerospace Center (DLR) to face the changing demands for railway vehicles and design a prospective train concept. To reach a travel speed of up to 400 km/h while reducing energy consumption, noise and wear is a challenging high level goal of the project. To achieve this, a novel mechatronic bogie with independently rotating wheels is designed aiming for enhanced running dynamics and continued floors on both levels of the double deck car body. An active guidance guarantees lateral stability and the enhanced running dynamics of this approach are already shown in simulations and on a 1:5 scale roller rig. In order to advance the research process, the running gear will be built up in 1:1 scale for a further verification of the advantages. This true scale prototype will brought into service in several intermediate steps that inter alia include pure virtual simulations, hardware-in-the-loop tests, preliminary hard- and software checks on an auxiliary low-budget test bench until experimental campaigns on external high-fidelity wheelset roller rigs will be launched. With this motivation a multi-physical simulation environment for the virtual commissioning of the 1:1 scale running gear is developed in this work Therefore, elaborate multibody models are established using the Modelica RailwayDynamics Library including the multibody dynamics in combination with mechatronic components and control algorithms. In an exemplary load scenario it is shown, how the performance of the lateral guidance control in case of excitations by lateral rail irregularities may be investigated on available wheelset roller rigs. In addition, the visualization of CAD data in the multibody simulation can be used for a vivid explanation of the running gear concept under realistic conditions. Overall, this work can be embedded in the progress pointing towards virtual homologation and digital twins.