Abstract
Railway infrastructures have played a critical role to ensure the continuity of goods and passenger transportation in China. Under extreme loading and environmental conditions, railway structures are vulnerable to deterioration and failure, leading to the interruption of the whole transportation system. Several techniques have been used for the health monitoring of railway structures. Optical fiber sensors are the widely recognized technique due to their inherent advantages such as high sensitivity, anti-electromagnetic interference, light weight, tiny size, corrosion resistance, and easy integration and network configuration. This paper provides a state-of-the-art of optical fiber sensing technologies and their practical application in railway infrastructures. In addition, the strain transfer analysis of optical fiber sensors is described for parameter reflection. A smart concept for artificial intelligence contribution is also declared. Finally, existing and future prospects on smart concept-based optical fiber sensors for railway infrastructure are discussed. The study can provide useful guidance to understand the problems in artificial intelligence which contributed to the Structural Health Monitoring system of railway structures.
Highlights
Railway infrastructures have played a critical role to the local economy by ensuring the continuity of freight and passenger transportation
Optical Time-Domain Reflectometry (OTDR) and Distributed Acoustic Sensors (DAS) based on Rayleigh scattering have a measurement range from 10–50 km, with low spatial resolution of 5–10 m that are suitable for dynamic measurements and long-distance monitoring
Strain transfer analysis can be used to interpret the data measured by optical fiber sensors, and to reflect the structural parameters and health state of railways [25,84,85,86]
Summary
Railway infrastructures have played a critical role to the local economy by ensuring the continuity of freight and passenger transportation. Engineers have recently built expensive infrastructures for newly developed high-speed trains, which require continuous health monitoring for safety concerns Potential hazards such as extreme natural disasters (high magnitude and frequency earthquakes, repetitive floods, landslides, etc.), human-made errors and aging effects can cause potentials risks or problems to the railway transportation systems. Other traditional sensing techniques/devices, such as accelerometers [14,15], acoustic emission [16,17,18], magnetic sensors [10], strain gauges [19], inclinometers [20], and digital image correlation (DIC) [21], have been commonly employed These approaches fail to fulfill the demand for low-cost, stable, long-term and high-accuracy performance monitoring of modern railway infrastructures. Temperature compensation and packaging methods have been addressed by several authors [31,32,33]
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