Improvement of accuracy of method for measuring axial force of rail based on natural frequency

Abstract

In order to evaluate the axial force of a continuous welded rail quantitatively in a simple manner, a method was developed to measure axial force based on the natural frequency. However, the accuracy of this method is insufficient because of certain variations in track condition. This study extracted factors which influence measurement accuracy and proposed an error correction method using track finite-element analysis for the purpose of improving the accuracy of this measuring method. Furthermore, measurements were taken of the natural frequency and axial force of a rail on a real track in order to validate the proposed method.