Testing of Railway Vehicles Using Roller Rigs

Roller rigs are laboratory devices enabling to study various phenomena in the field of railway vehicles dynamics and the wheel-rail contact. The main benefits of roller rig experiments are high controllability, repeatability and flexibility of experiment setup and usually also lower costs compared to the field tests. One of the goals of joint cooperation between the Czech Technical University in Prague, Czech Republic (CTU) and the Dnipropetrovsk National University of Railway Transport named after Academician V. Lazaryan, Ukraine (DNURT) is to design, build, and finally to operate at the DNURT laboratory the new roller rig. The presented paper is an initial study prepared within the framework the joint project. It summarizes the possibilities of roller rig utilization for railway vehicles research and describes the main concepts of existing design solutions.