Masahiro KANEKO’s research while affiliated with Tokyo Gas Co., Ltd. and other places

In recent years, condition monitoring technologies have been widely developed aiming at safer railway operation and maintenance cost reduction. Condition monitoring systems of railway for both from onboard and on track have been widely studied thanks to the recent development of sensors. Using equipped sensors on track, as an example of the bogie abnormality detection, the diagonal imbalance of wheel-load for four wheels in a bogie is closely related to the running safety on curve. If serious problem happens in the bogie frame, the diagonal imbalance may change, and wheel load reduction occurs. For these reasons, the monitoring of the diagonal imbalance from track has a potential usefulness. However, in our previous research, the measured imbalance can be varied even though the focused bogies run on the track under almost the same condition such as boarding rate, vehicle velocity and so on. If the cause of variation is clarified, the limit of abnormality detection accuracy can be clarified. Therefore, in this study, variation of the measurement of bogie’s diagonal wheel-load imbalance are investigated. Furthermore, factors that affect the variation of the measurement is investigated using MBD simulation.