Anti-yaw damping monitoring of railway secondary suspension through a nonlinear constrained approach integrated with a randomly variable wheel-rail interaction

The real-time monitoring of railway vehicles is becoming a key factor for safety and the optimization of the maintenance costs. In this context, the secondary anti-yaw suspension system represents a key element, subjected to degradation phenomenon. This paper presents a model-based real time monitoring technique of the anti-yaw damping. The approach is based on a constrained nonlinear estimation procedure that employs a railway vehicle modelling characterized by the presence of a random walk model for the wheel-rail interaction. The technique allows to employ a model-based approach, with advantages in terms of robustness respect to the interaction parameters, a priori no knowledge of the track irregularities and constraints applied to the estimated states.