Keywords: electro-mechanical simulation, traction drive-line, vehicle dynamics, wheel-rail contact, anti-slip slide, co-simulation, model validation.

The development of a traction chain for rail vehicles needs to take into account the interaction between electrical and mechanical systems, including excitations and loads mutually exchanged. On the path to develop and validate a complete co-simulation model in SIMPACK-Simulink, operating in closed loop for the assessment of the vehicle dynamics behaviour, the first step was the improvement of existing electrical traction models in Matlab-Simulink environment, with a simplified but consistent representation of the wheel-rail contact, and of the anti-slip-slide control. This paper describes in detail such electrical models, developed and validated for different types of vehicles, providing hints on the possibilities and limitations of usage. The development and validation of the inter-disciplinary methodology for the co-simulation of the whole electro-mechanical driveline system, in order to further improve the accuracy and reliability of the results, will be the object of a future paper.

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