Measurement and evaluation of wheel profiles of a rail vehicle on an underfloor wheelset lathe

Abstract Wheel profile form directly affects the dynamic behaviour of rail vehicles. Moreover, it is an important factor to ensure the safe running of a high-speed vehicle. As off-line measurements do not provide high-efficiency and high-accuracy wheel profile measurements, we focused on on-machine measurement and evaluation for obtaining the wheel profiles of a rail vehicle in this study. By combining the wheel machining with the wheel measurement, the measurement and evaluation of radial and axial wheel profiles on the underfloor wheelset lathe were proposed. The measurement of radial wheel profile based on two laser sensors was introduced, and the corresponding error models of on-machine measurement were established. The error models were used to separate the measurement errors from the measurement data. This can improve the accuracy of measuring the radial wheel profile effectively. For measuring the axial wheel profile, an adaptive correction method of profile error was proposed to suppress the measurement error, which was the basis for obtaining an accurate equivalent conicity. By measuring radial and axial wheel profiles, polygonisation evaluation and equivalent conicity were obtained to evaluate the radial and axial dynamic behaviours of a wheelset, respectively. Finally, the measurements were applied to an underfloor wheelset lathe to verify the effectiveness of measuring wheel profiles. In this study, we not only improved working efficiency for the machine tools, but also provided a high-accuracy measurement method for the wheel profiles of rail vehicle.