A Hybrid-Driven Fault Diagnosis Method for Railway Freight Car Braking System

With the increasing demand for heavy-haul railway freight, both the number and volume of heavy-haul freight cars continue to grow. As the core system of railway freight transportation, the reliable operation of the brake system is fundamental to ensuring train safety. The freight car braking system fault diagnosis model, which relies on historical data while failing to account for changes in braking curves when locomotives are coupled with different vehicles, is the main reason why early failures of the braking system are not diagnosed. Consequently, real-time monitoring of the freight car braking system and early fault diagnosis have emerged as a pivotal technical challenge that necessitates resolution within the framework of the railway freight maintenance reform. This paper proposes a novel hybrid-driven prediction method that effectively combines Convolutional Neural Networks, Adaptive Radial Basis Function Neural Networks, and Extreme Learning Machines (CARE). To achieve comprehensive fault feature extraction, based on CNN of the image data classification, the K-means clustering algorithm is introduced to adaptively initialize the radial basis centers of the RBF and recalculate the radial basis radii. Moreover, to improve the real-time performance and accuracy of fault diagnosis, the network layers are expanded, and the ELM algorithm is employed to construct an optimization strategy for high-dimensional data processing in the network layers. The experimental results demonstrate that when considering the coupling of different vehicles in the railway freight car, the proposed CARE model exhibits faster convergence speed and significantly improves the effectiveness and real-time performance of fault diagnosis in the railway freight car braking system.