Application of Operational Modal Analysis on Railway Vehicles Using on Track Measurements

Author(s):  
Lara Mª Erviti Calvo ◽  
Gorka Agirre Castellanos ◽  
Igor Alonso Portillo

Nowadays the application of experimental modal analysis techniques on railway vehicles is gaining importance. A correct identification of modal characteristics allows improving the dynamic behavior design of the vehicle and so reaching higher running speeds and accomplishing better comfort levels. So far, in the railway sector only conventional modal analysis techniques have been used. With these techniques, the modal parameters are determined during a static test by measuring the responses of the system to one or multiple known forces. This paper presents the application of the Operational Modal Analysis (OMA) technique on a railway vehicle. This technique determines the modal parameters employing only the responses of the system to an unknown excitation. In this way, the data to be used can be acquired during on track test which presents three main advantages. The first one is that the nonlinear components of the suspensions are working in their normal operating condition which is difficult to achieve during a static test. The second one is that the wheel spinning effect is taken into account. Finally, the test can be combined with other type of track tests, reducing the period of time before delivery of the vehicle to the client. In the case under study, the OMA technique is applied by means of commercial software to measurements performed on a passengers train. The modal parameters obtained for the carbody and one of the bogies are presented.

Author(s):  
Lara Erviti Calvo ◽  
Gorka Agirre Castellanos ◽  
Germán Gimenez

The application of Operational Modal Analysis (OMA) in the railway sector opens a broad field of opportunities. The validation of the numerical model employed in the design phase is usually performed employing data obtained in static tests. The drawback is that some suspension parameters, such as dampers, only have an influence in the dynamic behavior and not in the static behavior. Because of that, the use of the mode shapes identified from track measurements in combination with the static tests leads to a more accurate validation of the numerical model. Apart from that, most passenger comfort and dynamic problems are associated to slightly damped modes. A correct identification of the modal parameters can be used as a continuous design improvement tool to improve the comfort and dynamic characteristics of future designs. Another valuable application of OMA techniques is the identification of the mode shapes corresponding to instabilities, due to the safety impact that they have. In railway vehicles, instabilities are associated to mode shapes that present a damping rate which decreases with the increase of the running speed. Above a certain speed value, the excitation coming from track cannot be damped by the vehicle and it reaches an unstable condition. This unstable condition leads to high acceleration levels experienced by the passengers and high interaction forces between the wheel and the rail that may lead to safety hazards. The speed above which the vehicle is unstable is known as critical speed, and has to be greater than the maximum speed of the vehicle with a reasonable safety margin. The use of OMA techniques allows identifying the mode shape that causes the instability. This paper presents the application of OMA techniques to measurements performed on a passenger vehicle, in which the speed was increased until the vehicle was unstable. The mode shape that caused the instability was identified as well as its corresponding natural frequency and damping rate.


Procedia CIRP ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 77 ◽  
pp. 473-476 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan Berthold ◽  
Martin Kolouch ◽  
Volker Wittstock ◽  
Matthias Putz

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mohammadreza Salehi ◽  
Kultigin Demirlioglu ◽  
Emrah Erduran

<p>The accuracy of modal parameters identified by Operational Modal Analysis (OMA) algorithms is of vital importance in vibration-based health monitoring. This paper reports the effects of using different OMA algorithms on identified modal parameters of railway bridges. For this purpose, comparison and application of three different OMA methods including FDD, ARX, SSI-COV are discussed. The vibration measurements are conducted on two railway bridges in Northern Norway for using five triaxial accelerometers. The first bridge is a single-span bridge with the length of 50 m, while the second is a two-span bridge with a total length of 85m. OMA has been conducted on the free vibration responses after passage of different types of trains including light-weight railway vehicles and heavily loaded iron ore trains to evaluate the variation of the identified modal parameters with the chosen algorithm and the vibration source on the OMA results.</p>


Author(s):  
Xingxian Bao ◽  
Zhihui Liu ◽  
Chen Shi

Operational modal analysis (OMA) has been widely used for large structures. However, measured signals are inevitably contaminated with noise and may not be clean enough for identifying the modal parameters with proper accuracy. The traditional methods to estimate modal parameters in noisy situation are usually absorbing the “noise modes” first, and then using the stability diagrams to distinguish the true modes from the “noise modes.” However, it is still difficult to sort out true modes because the “noise modes” will also tend to be stable as the model order increases. This study develops a noise reduction procedure for polyreference complex exponential (PRCE) modal analysis based on ambient vibration responses. In the procedure, natural excitation technique (NExT) is first applied to get free decay responses from measured (noisy) ambient vibration data, and then the noise reduction method based on solving the partially described inverse singular value problem (PDISVP) is implemented to reconstruct a filtered data matrix from the measured data matrix. In our case, the measured data matrix is block Hankel structured, which is constructed based on the free decay responses. The filtered data matrix should maintain the block Hankel structure and be lowered in rank. When the filtered data matrix is obtained, the PRCE method is applied to estimate the modal parameters. The proposed NExT-PDISVP-PRCE scheme is applied to field test of a jacket type offshore platform. Results indicate that the proposed method can improve the accuracy of OMA.


Author(s):  
Xuchu Jiang ◽  
Feng Jiang ◽  
Biao Zhang

Operational modal analysis (OMA) is a procedure that allows the modal parameters of a structure to be extracted from the measured response to an unknown excitation generated during operation. Nonlinearity is inevitably and frequently encountered in OMA. The problem: The traditional OMA method based on linear modal theory cannot be applied to a nonlinear oscillation system. The solution: This paper aims to propose a nonlinear OMA method for nonlinear oscillation systems. The new OMA method is based on the following: (1) a self-excitation phenomenon is caused by nonlinear components; (2) the nonlinear normal modes (NNMs) of the system appear under a single-frequency harmonic excitation; and (3) using forced response data, the symbolic regression method (SR) can be used to automatically search for the NNMs of the system, whose modal parameters are implicit in the expression structure expressing each NNM. The simulation result of a three-degree-of-freedom (3-DOF) nonlinear system verifies the correctness of the proposed OMA method. Then, a disc-rod rotor model is considered, and the proposed OMA method’s capability is further evaluated.


2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexis Klauber Chaia Kléperon ◽  
Robson Demétrius Araújo Abreu ◽  
Rômulo Morais Bitencourt ◽  
Francis José Marochi Almeida

2015 ◽  
Vol 76 (8) ◽  
Author(s):  
Haizuan Abd Rahman ◽  
Ahmad Azlan Mat Isa ◽  
Abdul Rahim Bahari

This study attempts to apply vibration-based damage detection method specifically Operational Modal Analysis (OMA) on fiberglass reinforced epoxy plate. OMA is used on healthy fiber glass reinforced epoxy plate to extract the modal parameters and the procedure is extended to damaged fiberglass reinforced epoxy plate. Both healthy and damaged composite material are tested under different boundary conditions i.e. free-free on 4 edges, 1 edge clamped, 2 edges clamped, 3 edges clamped and 4 edges of free-free boundary condition. The result of frequency from OMA was compared analytically with Finite Element Method (FEM). Nastran software is employed in this study. The FEM using Nastran shows that the result obtained is not accurate enough compared to OMA. Therefore, another method was applied to look at the effectiveness of OMA method using Experimental Modal Analysis (EMA). It was observed that both EMA and OMA methods gave small deviation and good correlation.


2012 ◽  
Vol 19 (5) ◽  
pp. 1071-1083 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christof Devriendt ◽  
Tim De Troyer ◽  
Gert De Sitter ◽  
Patrick Guillaume

During the recent years several new tools have been introduced by the Vrije Universiteit Brussel in the field of Operational Modal Analysis (OMA) such as the transmissibility based approach and the the frequency-domain OMAX concept. One advantage of the transmissibility based approach is that the ambient forces may be coloured (non-white), if they are fully correlated. The main advantage of the OMAX concept is the fact that it combines the advantages of Operational and Experimental Modal Analysis: ambient (unknown) forces as well as artificial (known) forces are processed simultaneously resulting in improved modal parameters. In this paper, the transmissibility based output-only approach is combined with the input/output OMAX concept. This results in a new methodology in the field of operational modal analysis allowing the estimation of (scaled) modal parameters in the presence of arbitrary ambient (unknown) forces and artificial (known) forces.


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