抄録
Condition monitoring of railway tracks are essential in ensuring the safety of railways. Preventive maintenance repairing before an accident occurs is an important challenge. Current inspection method of tracks is by track maintenance staff and by track inspection car. These method can be highly accurate inspection, but it is limited to use in local lines. Therefore the condition monitoring techniques that can be adopted in the local railway is required. In the context, a condition monitoring system of railway track using in-service vehicle has been developed. In-service vehicles equipped with sensors and GPS systems can act as probes to detect and analyze real-time vehicle vibration. Such trains are known as "probe vehicles". Recently, a compact size on-board sensing device has been developed. This paper describes the track condition monitoring system using the compact size on-board sensing device and the diagnosis software. It is known that a car-body acceleration is effective for making rough estimate of track condition. This diagnosis software uses RMS of car-body acceleration as evaluation index for basic analysis. However, the RMS values can't isolate the track faults due to the lack of frequency information. Thus, continuous wavelet transform (CWT) and discrete wavelet transform (DWT) are employed to extract different type of the track faults. The validity of this software was evaluated by simulation studies. Simulation results showed that the diagnosis software is useful for track condition monitoring. Monitoring experience in a local railway line showed that the system is effective for practical use.
