Real-time modeling of wheel-rail contact laws with system-on-chip

Zhou, Y; Mei, TX; Freear, S

Abstract

This paper presents the development and implementation of a multiprocessor system-on-chip solution for fast and real-time
simulations of complex and nonlinear wheel-rail contact mechanics. There are two main significances in this paper. First, the wheel-rail
contact laws (including Hertz and Fastsim algorithms), which are widely used in the study of railway vehicle dynamics, are restructured
for improved suitability that can take advantage of the rapid developing multiprocessor technology. Second, the complex algorithms for
the contact laws are successfully implemented on a medium-sized Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) device using six NiosII
processors, where the executions of the Hertz and Fastsim parts are pipelined to achieve further enhancement in multiple contacts and
the operation scheduling is optimized. In the Fastsim part, the floating point units with buffering mechanism are efficiently shared by
five processors connected in a token ring topology. The FPGA design shows good flexibility in utilizing logic element and on-chip
memory resource on the device and scalability for a significant speed up on a larger device in future work.

Citation

Zhou, Y., Mei, T., & Freear, S. (2010). Real-time modeling of wheel-rail contact laws with system-on-chip. IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, 21(5), 672-684. https://doi.org/10.1109/TPDS.2009.107

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Publication Date: Jan 1, 2010
• Deposit Date: Dec 21, 2011
• Journal: IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems
• Print ISSN: 1045-9219
• Publisher: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 21
• Issue: 5
• Pages: 672-684
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/TPDS.2009.107
• Publisher URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/TPDS.2009.107