3. Performance improvement of virtual running test environment for railway vehicles using HILS system

It is now possible to accurately reproduce the movement of vehicles in a train set on a rolling stock test plant.
A method was developed to build a model for accurately reproducing the motion of a carbody including elastic vibrations.

A HILS (Hardware In the Loop Simulation) system for railway vehicles has already been constructed for reproducing the running behavior of vehicles on a service line, in order to substitute for running tests on a service line. This system uses a combination of numerical calculations and tests on a real component, which works in real-time, and makes it possible to reproduce rigid carbody motion. The present research however aims to increase the precision of vehicle motion simulation when running on a service line by improving the accuracy of the system itself and broadening the frequency range.

More specifically, two additional methods were developed and proposed: the first is to add excitation input to the roller rig on the rolling stock test plant. The second is compensate the mechanical rigidity of car-end simulation device to simulate the movement of trainset.

The results demonstrated that this method made vehicle motion behavior with accuracy on the rolling stock test plant. (Fig.1). Furthermore, for the development of individual components, the HILS system is constructed using a real component and a numerical carbody model. In order to make the simulation more realistic, the carbody model is built to enable simulation of elastic vibrations. Validation test results of this carbody model confirmed that the estimated values for the carbody floor vibration acceleration agreed with the actual values (Fig.2).

These results show that this HILS system makes it possible to reproduce the motion of vehicle in a trainset on a commercial railway line.

Fig.1 Exciting test results of a simulated train set running
on a rolling stock test plant
Fig.2 Practical example of HILS system in use
for the development of actual component