Lab-Scale Railway Testing Prototype Design

Palosky, Jacob

Student Work

Lab-Scale Railway Testing Prototype Design

Public Deposited

The increasing need to make technology greener to reduce the effects of climate change on the world has led to a desire to develop new and more efficient and environmentally friendly methods of running existing transportation technology such as rail transit. Current rail efficiency testing often occurs either as costly and inefficient full-scale testing or as predictive software for maintenance and driver strategy. Developing a laboratory-scale test fixture would help alleviate some major costs associated with rail testing and improvements, allowing companies to speed up their development pipeline. The goal of this project is to improve one such system by implementing dynamic rail weight adjustment and track incline parameters into the scale model. An electro-pneumatic regulator and a servo motor were used to modify the existing prototype to accomplish these goals. The implementation was successfully able to adjust the track normal force to match the actual scale rail car weights and change the rail car motor power output accordingly, while the servo motor was fully set up to account for track incline.

This report represents the work of one or more WPI undergraduate students submitted to the faculty as evidence of completion of a degree requirement. WPI routinely publishes these reports on its website without editorial or peer review.

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