Preliminary Frequency Response Analysis of a Contact Force Measurement System for Rail Applications

This paper presents a finite element (FE) modeling and frequency response analysis of an instrumented wheelset for rail applications. The wheelset was equipped with strain gauges to estimate contact forces at the interface between the wheels and the rails. The objective is to showcase the simulation results of the wheelset state-space reduced model, which represents the dynamic behavior of the FE wheelset. The frequency response results of the FE and state-space models are compared. The paper demonstrates how the reduced model accurately represents the behavior of the FE system, resulting in significantly improved simulation and calculation speed, with a great reduction in memory usage. Furthermore, the state-space representation provides the flexibility to augment and manage data points for enhanced post-processing manipulation.