Railway track management based on vibration data of in-service train measured by a mobile device

Abstract

Currently, the maintenance of railway tracks is carried out based on track irregularity measurement data. The vibration data of running vehicles are easy to measure and can be the base of track maintenance, but they have not been used by basic data of track maintenance because of the shortage of repeatability. However, there are an increasing number of cases where small portable information terminals are used as simple and inexpensive vehicle vibration measuring devices. Therefore, the authors tried to construct the method for track management based on vehicle vibration data measured by permanently installed small terminals on in-service trains with high frequency. Data accumulation of vehicle vibration of in-service trains have been carried out for more than one year in a regional railway line. After the analysis of collected vibration data, the authors successfully conclude the possibility of the “vehicle-vibration-based track maintenance”. In this paper, the authors propose the method to obtain accurate positioning data of the trains from GPS speed data. The relationship between car-body vertical acceleration and track irregularity showed the possibility of track maintenance based on car-body vibration.

Keywords

• railway
• condition monitoring
• track irregularity
• vehicle vibration
• iot device
• gps
• wave analysis