Development of a Railway Track Displacement Monitoring by Using Digital Image Correlation Technique

Abstract

To avoid an unnecessary catastrophic accident due to a failure of a railway track, it is important to have a reliable condition monitoring system for the railway track. The integrity of the railway track can be assessed by monitoring the displacement field of the track, which can then be used to determine the strain and stress field. By knowing the stress history of the track and the S–N curves of the track material, the remaining life of the railway track can be predicted. In the present work, a simple system to monitor and record the displacement field of the railway track has been developed by using Digital Image Correlation (DIC) technique. The set–up to monitor the displacement field of the railway track was developed using a high speed video camera of Nikon J1 to capture the image of the railway track when the train passing through. The DIC technique was then employed off line to measure the displacement field of the 2D image captured. The results showed that the full field displacement measured by using DIC technique gives a good agreement compared to the finite element results. The full field displacement can be used to calculate the strain-stress field, and later on the remaining life assessment can be conducted based on the results.