In situ measurements of the crossing vibrations of a railway turnout

Abstract

Vibration-based condition monitoring is a powerful tool for remotely assessing the quality of railway components. Due to its design, railway crossings suffer from faster degradation, because of the transition from stock rail onto the needle. Since this is also a repetitive load, a small amount of wear will increase the degradation. Measuring the dynamic response also contains information about the transition of the train wheel from the stock rail onto the needle.In this paper, a setup that measures the acceleration and the strain of a railway crossing during train passages is presented. The responses of these two measurement techniques are analyzed for two different types of trains. A linear correlation between the peak values of the strain and the nominal axle load is presented with a regression value of -1.8·10-5. From the accelerations, both the displacement and the transient wheel-rail contact can be analyzed.