Author(s)

T. Kojima, H. Tsunashima & A. Matsumoto

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 the vertical acceleration of a vehicle body by timefrequency analysis. An actual vehicle running tests on a commercial line was conducted, in which vertical acceleration of axle-boxes and a vehicle body were measured. In this paper we show the rail corrugation can be detected from the vertical acceleration of a vehicle body by multi-resolution analysis (MRA) using wavelet transform. Keywords: railway, spectrum analysis, diagnostics, rail corrugation, fault detection, wavelet, multi-resolution analysis. 1 Introduction Faults of railway tracks not only cause deterioration in ride quality but also generate noise and have the potential to cause serious accidents. The track faults have conventionally been measured using exclusive track inspection vehicles. However, this method is costly and is therefore not widely employed on local and sub-main lines. It also has a problem in that very frequent inspections cannot be made if schedules are overcrowded, even on priority lines. If faults can be detected by attaching simple sensors such as accelerometers to commercial vehicles, more efficient maintenance of tracks would be possible. Such vehicles are called \“probe-vehicles”. In order to put \“probe-vehicles” to

Keywords

railway, spectrum analysis, diagnostics, rail corrugation, fault detection, wavelet, multi-resolution analysis.