Automatic Slip Control for Railway Vehicles

Abstract: In the railway industry, slip control has always been essential due to the low friction between the wheels and the rail. In this master’s thesis we have gathered several slip control methods and evaluated them. These evaluations were performed in Matlab-Simulink on a slip process model of a railway vehicle. The objective with these evaluations were to show advantages and disadvantages with the different slip control methods. The results clearly show the advantage of using a slip optimizing control method, i.e. a method that finds the optimal slip and thereby maximizes the use of adhesion. We have developed two control strategies that we have found superior in this matter. These methods have a lot in common. For instance they both use an adhesion observer and non-linear gain, which enables fast optimization. The difference lies in how this non-linear gain is formed. One strategy uses an adaptive algorithm to estimate it and the other uses fuzzy logic. A problem to overcome in order to have well functioning slip controllers is the formation of vehicle velocity. This is a consequence of the fact that most slip controllers use the velocity as a control signal.