Wheel wear reduction of a mechatronic two-axle vehicle controlled with feedforward wheelset steering approaches

The mechatronic vehicle developed within the Shift2Rail projects Run2Rail, Pivot, NEXTGEAR, and Pivot2 is evaluated with respect to wheel wear. The KTH wear model is used to determine the coefficients of Archard's wear map to reproduce measured worn wheel profiles of the present vehicle running on Metro Madrid line 10. The same wear model is then used to evaluate the performance of the mechatronic vehicle controlled with two variants of a feedforward controller. The first one uses on-board measurements, while the second one is optimised using firefly optimisation algorithms assuming knowledge of the travelled track. The control strategy based on on-board measurements shows improvements above 60% in terms of lost wheel volume due to wear, compared to the standard bogie vehicle. The optimised controller reaches improvements above 70%. Good coherence is found between improvements predicted with the wear number and the ones achieved in terms of lost wheel volume.