Fault Detection and Isolation Strategy for Brake Actuation Units of High-Speed Trains Under Variable Operating Conditions

The brake system is a key system for the safe operation and stopping of trains. As a core component of brake systems, the brake actuation unit (BAU) is essential for slowing down or stopping trains, and faults in the BAU will affect the safety and efficiency of train operation. In order to detect and locate faults in the BAU in time, a fault detection and isolation (FDI) strategy, based on mutual residuals (MRs), principal component analysis (PCA) and improved reconstruction-based contribution plots (IRBCP), was proposed. Firstly, the structural composition and working principle of the BAU were introduced, and its typical failure modes and effects were analyzed. Secondly, considering that the fault detection threshold is not easy to determine due to the variable operating conditions of the BAU, the steady-state fault feature based on MR was extracted. Thirdly, fault detection and isolation were realized based on PCA and the IRBCP algorithm. Finally, by using the fault injection method, case studies on test-rig experiment data of brake systems were conducted; the fault detection rate was 99% and the effectiveness of the proposed strategy was validated by the test data. The proposed strategy shows fast computing ability, and is suitable for systems with dynamic time-varying and nonlinear characteristics.