Fault detection of railway track from on-board measurement data (1st report, detection of rail corrugation)

Abstract

Conditions of track have conventionally been measured by using exclusive inspection vehicles. If the conditions of the track can be detected by attaching simple sensors such as accelerometers on board of commercial vehicles, more efficient maintenance of tracks would be possible. This paper describes rail corrugation detection from vertical acceleration of a vehicle body and the running noise by time-frequency analysis. An actual vehicle running tests on a commercial line was conducted, in which vertical acceleration of axle boxes and a vehicle body, and exterior noise were measured. In this paper we show first, the rail corrugation can be detected from the vertical acceleration of vehicle body by multi-resolution analysis (MRA) using wavelet transform. Second, it is shown that the incipient corrugation can be detected effectively from the exterior noise measured in actual vehicle, and finally, these methods can be applied to the detection of rail corrugation from interior noise measured in passenger room.