An autonomous, low cost, distributed method for observing vehicle track interactions

Experience and field studies have shown that track geometry alone is not a good predictor of rail vehicle response. This paper describes a family of "Health Card" devices - an autonomous device that can be distributed on rolling stock to analyse the vehicle responses. As a distributed syst...

Full description

Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Wolfs, Peter, Bleakly, S., Senini, S., Thomas, P.
Other Authors: Unknown
Format: Conference Paper
Published: IEEE 2006
Subjects:
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11937/6325
_version_ 1848745043918061568
author Wolfs, Peter
Bleakly, S.
Senini, S.
Thomas, P.
author2 Unknown
author_facet Unknown
Wolfs, Peter
Bleakly, S.
Senini, S.
Thomas, P.
author_sort Wolfs, Peter
building Curtin Institutional Repository
collection Online Access
description Experience and field studies have shown that track geometry alone is not a good predictor of rail vehicle response. This paper describes a family of "Health Card" devices - an autonomous device that can be distributed on rolling stock to analyse the vehicle responses. As a distributed system is desired, and the intent is to apply this technology widely across a vehicle fleet, a low initial capital cost and low operating cost solution is desirable. As a consequence the Health Card performs all its sensing operations on the car body and avoids the costs and complications of sensing below the car body especially on unsprung components. Health Cards use solid-state transducers including accelerometers and angular rate sensors with a coordinate transform to resolve car body motions into six degrees of freedom. They then apply spectrogram techniques to obtain a time-frequency representation of the car body motion. These representations are autonomously analyzed to detect and classify transient dynamic events and to infer track degradation or operational risks
first_indexed 2025-11-14T06:11:05Z
format Conference Paper
id curtin-20.500.11937-6325
institution Curtin University Malaysia
institution_category Local University
last_indexed 2025-11-14T06:11:05Z
publishDate 2006
publisher IEEE
recordtype eprints
repository_type Digital Repository
spelling curtin-20.500.11937-63252017-10-02T02:27:19Z An autonomous, low cost, distributed method for observing vehicle track interactions Wolfs, Peter Bleakly, S. Senini, S. Thomas, P. Unknown rails time-frequency analysis railways vehicle dynamics accelerometers railway engineering fast Fourier transforms maintenance engineering computerised instrumentation risk analysis Experience and field studies have shown that track geometry alone is not a good predictor of rail vehicle response. This paper describes a family of "Health Card" devices - an autonomous device that can be distributed on rolling stock to analyse the vehicle responses. As a distributed system is desired, and the intent is to apply this technology widely across a vehicle fleet, a low initial capital cost and low operating cost solution is desirable. As a consequence the Health Card performs all its sensing operations on the car body and avoids the costs and complications of sensing below the car body especially on unsprung components. Health Cards use solid-state transducers including accelerometers and angular rate sensors with a coordinate transform to resolve car body motions into six degrees of freedom. They then apply spectrogram techniques to obtain a time-frequency representation of the car body motion. These representations are autonomously analyzed to detect and classify transient dynamic events and to infer track degradation or operational risks 2006 Conference Paper http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11937/6325 IEEE fulltext
spellingShingle rails
time-frequency analysis
railways
vehicle dynamics
accelerometers
railway engineering
fast Fourier transforms
maintenance engineering
computerised instrumentation
risk analysis
Wolfs, Peter
Bleakly, S.
Senini, S.
Thomas, P.
An autonomous, low cost, distributed method for observing vehicle track interactions
title An autonomous, low cost, distributed method for observing vehicle track interactions
title_full An autonomous, low cost, distributed method for observing vehicle track interactions
title_fullStr An autonomous, low cost, distributed method for observing vehicle track interactions
title_full_unstemmed An autonomous, low cost, distributed method for observing vehicle track interactions
title_short An autonomous, low cost, distributed method for observing vehicle track interactions
title_sort autonomous, low cost, distributed method for observing vehicle track interactions
topic rails
time-frequency analysis
railways
vehicle dynamics
accelerometers
railway engineering
fast Fourier transforms
maintenance engineering
computerised instrumentation
risk analysis
url http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11937/6325