Abstract
Conditions of track have conventionally been measured using exclusive inspection vehicles. If the conditions of the track can be detected by attaching simple sensors such as accelerometers on board, more efficient maintenance of tracks would be possible. This paper describes rail corrugation detection from vertical acceleration of a vehicle body and the running noise by time-frequency analysis. An actual vehicle experiment in real route was conducted which measured vertical acceleration of axleboxes and a vehicle body, and exterior noise. Multi-resolution analysis (MRA) of wavelet transform is used to analyze the vehicle body acceleration. It is shown that the rail corrugation can be detected by MRA. A method to detect the rail corrugation from the running noise is suggested, and the noise measured in actual vehicle was analyzed. The result demonstrates that incipient corrugation can be detected effectively.
