Squats and corrugation detection of railway track based on time-frequency analysis by using bogie acceleration measurements

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper concerns the track defects detection issue with the aid of bogie acceleration measured from the in-service vehicle. The detection principle and the acceleration sensors are introduced in the first place. To validate the feasibility of the detection method, a vehicle-track dynamic model with different defects of corrugations and squats on the track is built first by using SIMPACK. The bogie acceleration (BA) collected by the acceleration sensor installed on the four corners of bogie frame is measured for the defects detection. Then time-frequency analysis is proceeded to extract time-frequency features of the various track defects, the simulation result indicates that the proposed method can detect the track defects in the light of the feature frequencies derived from the continuous wavelets analysis and the feature modes from the empirical mode decomposition (EMD) method. After that, field test experiments are carried out at Shanghai metro Line 1. The results show that the proposed method can detect squats and corrugation defects by using the measured bogie acceleration from the in-service train successfully.