The ballast bed constitutes the cornerstone of the ballasted track. A fouled ballast bed poses a significant threat to its performance, potentially resulting in severe consequences. In recent years, studies have shown that infrared thermography (IRT) technology has emerged as a promising method for detecting the fouled ballast bed. The surface temperatures of clean and fouled ballast beds differ because of their distinct thermodynamic properties. To effectively utilize temperature for identifying the fouled ballast bed, it is essential to accurately predict surface temperatures for two threshold levels of fouling in real-time. To address the issue, this paper proposes an improved BiGRU model (CBGA), and the main contributions are as follows. First, a formula for the surface heat flux density of the ballast bed was derived. In conjunction with existing research findings, the key factors affecting its surface temperature were identified as inputs to the neural network, including the solar radiation intensity, air temperature, wind speed, and humidity. Next, thermodynamic finite element models were established based on a field experiment, which can be utilized to expand the sample library. Leveraging this groundwork, 430 days of temperature data and meteorological data were acquired to train the neural network. Before inputting data into the BiGRU model, CNN and Attention mechanisms were employed to extract local and significant features. Furthermore, a residual network was introduced to ensure the model’s performance. It exhibits superior performance compared to other models. Subsequently, the CBGA model was used to study the impact of different time steps on the prediction accuracy. It was found that a time step of 660 minutes resulted in the best predictive performance. At this time, the evaluation indicators on the testing dataset were: MSE = 0.057, RMSE = 0.238, MAE = 0.168, and MAPE = 0.008. Finally, the reliability and feasibility of the CBGA model were validated using experimental data. These findings demonstrate that the proposed method can achieve real-time prediction of the ballast surface temperature, laying a solid foundation for the practical application of IRT technology in railway maintenance.
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