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Abstract
Railway infrastructure managers run dedicated inspection vehicles to monitor the geometric quality of the track (among other aspects) to detect irregularities and ensure safe running conditions of railway lines, in accordance with specific regulations. Unfortunately, these inspections disturb the normal traffic operation, especially in networks with intense traffic; are generally carried out only a few times per year; and, consequently, do not provide prompt identification of critical situations. Considering the recent developments and cost reduction in sensing capabilities of smartphones, the authors present an approach to use these technologies to perform constant acceleration measurements inside in‐service trains to complement the assessment of the structural performance and geometrical degradation of the tracks. Cross‐correlation values above 0.85 were obtained between the standard deviations of the longitudinal level and the experimental vertical accelerations measured on‐board a passenger train on an 11‐km railway stretch. The results showed that the approach can be used to identify critical situations that affect the performance of the track, regarding passenger comfort, degradation rates, and risk of derailment. It may comprise a low‐cost and crowdsourced complement to the general current practice of track geometric inspection by dedicated vehicles and contribute to an earlier detection of track malfunctions, consequently, to a more efficient maintenance planning and infrastructure management.
Highlights
The position of the rails changes with time, mostly caused by the development of differential settlements in the structure and by the accumulated railway traffic, which induces wear of components and plastic deformations in the supporting layers [1,2,3]
To that aim, dedicated inspection vehicles are used by infrastructure managers to perform the auscultation of the track geometry to detect critical situations and to plan maintenance interventions requiring heavy machinery. e reconstruction of track geometry from track inspection cars is a well-established procedure and these vehicles are currently manufactured on an industrial basis by a few suppliers [2]
Correlation with the Track Geometry. It is common practice by railway infrastructure managers to calculate the standard deviation of the longitudinal level, to assess the track geometric quality, to study its degradation evolution, and to plan early maintenance operations, for which threshold values are established in European norms [10]
Summary
The position of the rails changes with time, mostly caused by the development of differential settlements in the structure and by the accumulated railway traffic, which induces wear of components and plastic deformations in the supporting layers [1,2,3]. A newer version of this norm is currently under discussion prEN 13848-2:2018 Both the monitoring surveys by the inspection vehicles and the maintenance works are expensive activities that hinder normal railway traffic. E study demonstrates further applicability of the approach to assess the structural performance of railway tracks, by assessing how different wavelengths and amplitudes of the geometric irregularities affect degradation, running safety, and ride comfort, supported on dynamic train-track numerical simulations [25, 26]. Because this work focuses mainly on the vertical behaviour of the track, its geometric quality will be analysed in terms of the longitudinal level and its standard deviation This parameter is mostly associated to the track degradation and develops faster with traffic and time. It is interesting to note that the locations denoting disturbances in the longitudinal level records of D1 do not match those of D2, which is expected given that the track defects of these two wavelength ranges normally have different sources [2, 29,30,31]
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