Steering Performance Evaluation of Active Steering Bogie to Reduce Wheel Wear on Test Line

When a railway vehicle runs on a curved section, wear of wheels and rails occur. This is due to the attack angle of the wheel on the rails that occurs because the steering function of the bogie is insufficient. To overcome these problems, we developed an active steering bogie equipped with an electro-mechanical type of active steering system. The prototype of active steering bogie was manufactured and installed on a test train that operated in sections with many curved sections. Steering performance tests for the test train were carried out on commercial line as the test line. As a result of the test, the performance of curvature radius estimation of the active steering bogie showed a very good performance, with only 2.4% error compared with the track design value. The performance of steering angle implementation of the passive bogie running on the curved section is very poor, but that of the active steering bogie is very good. And the lateral force of the wheel, which is directly related to the wheel wear when running on the curved section, showed a maximum 88.1% reduction of the lateral force. Therefore, considering the test results of the active steering bogie in the test line, the steering performance of the active steering bogie developed for reducing the wheel and rail wear is evaluated to be very good. And the wear of wheel measured after test run was 0.54 mm flange wear in passive bogie, but flange wear was not occurred in active steering bogie.