Abstract
Nowadays, railway freight transportation is becoming more and more crucial since it represents the best alternative to road transport in terms of sustainability, pollution, and impact on the environment and on public health. Upgrading the potentiality of this kind of transportation, it would be possible to avoid delays in goods deliveries due to road accidents, traffic jams, and other situation occurring on roads. A key factor in this framework is therefore represented by monitoring and maintenance of the train components. Implementing a real time monitoring of the main components and a predictive maintenance approach, it would be possible to avoid unexpected breakdowns and consequently unavailability of wagons for unscheduled repair activities. As highlighted in recent statistical analysis, one of the elements more critical in case of failure is represented by the brake system. In this view, a real time monitoring of pressure values in some specific points of the system would provide significant information on its health status. In addition, since the braking actions are related to the load present on the convoy, thanks to this kind of monitoring, it would be possible to appreciate the different behavior of the system in case of loaded and unloaded trains. This paper presented an innovative wireless monitoring system to perform brake system diagnostics. A low-power system architecture, in terms of energy harvesting and wireless communication, was developed due to the difficulty in applying a wired monitoring system to a freight convoy. The developed system allows acquiring brake pressure data in critical points in order to verify the correct behavior of the brake system. Experimental results collected during a five-month field test were provided to validate the approach.
Highlights
As highlighted in recent EU-funded research projects, the performances of railway freight transportation have increased in the last few years and the projection is that the trend will continue in the future because it represents the best alternative from the sustainability point of view with respect to road freight transportation, which instead has a huge impact on the environment [1–4]
The field campaign allowed us to test the functioning of the monitoring system in a real case scenario and to collect a good amount of experimental data
Data acquired by the industrial wired sensors were used to validate the measurements performed by the developed wireless sensor nodes
Summary
As highlighted in recent EU-funded research projects, the performances of railway freight transportation have increased in the last few years and the projection is that the trend will continue in the future because it represents the best alternative from the sustainability point of view with respect to road freight transportation, which instead has a huge impact on the environment [1–4]. The previous problems underline that to improve system reliability it is necessary to install a smart monitoring system on wagons to perform predictive maintenance of the braking system This kind of apparatus should take advantage of wireless communication due to the unfeasibility of wirings on this kind of vehicles and of energy harvesting since no power supply is Sensors 2022, 22, 1876 nowadays present on freight wagons. It is shown how the collected data can be used to pursue a predictive maintenance approach able to identify possible faults in the brake system
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