A review on fault diagnosis for rail vehicles

Abstract

Nowadays, with the rapid development of technology, rail vehicles are becoming not only faster and more efficient, but also more intelligent. However, a critical issue for rail transportation is still safety and reliability. Rail vehicles include vehicle bodies, doors, power and transmission systems, bogies, brake systems, electrical systems, signal systems, and other auxiliary function systems. They usually work in complex environment, generate loud noise and face various potential faults. These characteristics make fault diagnosis and reliability assurance challenging. Based on survey of relevant literature in past 15 years, this paper summarizes theories, methods, and techniques of fault diagnosis for key components and subsystems of rail vehicles. Meantime, fault detection and remote diagnosis are discussed with respect to characteristics of rail vehicles. Finally, future research directions in these areas for rail vehicles are also discussed, that is, exploring inner depth of reliability assurance, accelerating research from appearance to mechanism, speeding up the transformation from theories to application, effectively improving fault diagnosis and health management capabilities for critical rail transportation equipment.