Abstract
This paper focuses on new instrumented trolleys, allowing automated 3D inspection of railway infrastructures, using optical scanning principles and devices for defects and damage evaluation. Inspection of rolling components is crucial for wear evaluation and to schedule maintenance interventions to assure safety. Currently, inspection trolleys are mainly instrumented with 2D contact or optical sensors. The application of 3D non-contact digitizers proposed in this paper allows for a quick and more complete monitoring of the health conditions of railways, also in combination with a proper procedure for automatic 3D inspection. The results of the experimental tests using 3D portable optical scanners on railways are compared with results obtained by a trolley instrumented with 2D contact sensors. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of the trolleys mounting 3D handheld optical digitizers with proper automated software inspection procedures.
Highlights
The inspection and monitoring of railway infrastructures are important issues for their sustainability and further maintenance. These diagnostic tasks are often repetitive, time consuming and, above all, they do not provide complete datasets to analyze the wear and damage progress over the rolling components, as most of them are based on human visual checks, the use of cut-outs and trolleys instrumented with 2D contact or optical measuring probes [1]
The first trolley was studied to inspect a single track by using a single 3D optical scanner (Figure 7)
The 3D optical scanners mounted on this trolley were two, one for each side of the line (Figure 9)
Summary
The inspection and monitoring of railway infrastructures are important issues for their sustainability and further maintenance These diagnostic tasks are often repetitive, time consuming and, above all, they do not provide complete datasets to analyze the wear and damage progress over the rolling components, as most of them are based on human visual checks, the use of cut-outs and trolleys instrumented with 2D contact or optical measuring probes [1]. The current inspection procedures on rolling components of railway lines imply large human involvement. For these reasons, the development of robotic or automated trolleys based on the use of Sensors 2020, 20, 2927; doi:10.3390/s20102927 www.mdpi.com/journal/sensors. The use of 3D digitizers is one of the best methods to validate wear mathematical models developed to study the damage of rolling components [12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22]
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