| Project Detail |
On track for improved railway safety
The global expansion of railway systems has raised a pressing concern: how to ensure safety. The challenge lies in continuous monitoring, especially of critical components like rail bridges. Traditionally, static sensor networks have been relied upon for condition assessment, but they’re costly, lack mobility and cant ensure uninterrupted monitoring. With the backing of Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions, the OMoRail project focuses on the indirect monitoring of rail bridges, drawing inspiration from Vehicle-Bridge Interaction (VBI) principles. What sets OMoRail apart is its dynamic methodology that harnesses in-service trains for continuous monitoring, simultaneously factoring in the often-overlooked surface roughness. By fusing VBI models with vibration measurements from traversing trains, this project promises to revolutionise railway safety and reliability.
Railway systems are expanding rapidly worldwide as a green means of transportation. Such rapid expansion poses a challenge to
guaranteeing safety and ensuring the quality of railway systems. Continuous monitoring of tracks and rail bridges can help diagnose
and prognose damage timely, increasing railway transportation reliability. In this project, we focus on rail bridges, whose condition
assessment traditionally relies on a static network of sensors. Although well-established, this technique lacks portability, entails
considerable cost and effort, and, crucially, inhibits continuous monitoring, as the lifespan of sensors is generally smaller than that of
the bridge. To tackle these limitations, indirect monitoring practices have recently gained attraction. Such methods extract the
dynamic properties of bridges via measurements from traversing vehicles by exploiting the Vehicle-Bridge Interaction (VBI) principle.
This way they offer mobility and lower installation and maintenance costs. However, the majority of studies on indirect monitoring of
bridges focus on highways. Despite the similarities of VBI modelling between highways and railways, distinct differences (e.g. vehicle
and contact models, moving speed, loading patterns) do not allow the direct application of current indirect monitoring methods to
railway bridges. Another challenge is the blurring effect of surface roughness, which, simplistically, is typically considered as known or
is eliminated. To this end, this project proposes a consistent methodology to continuously monitor railway bridges via On-Board
Monitoring of in-service trains, with a simultaneous characterization of the involved roughness profiles. Accordingly, it proposes a
hybrid modelling procedure that considers a VBI model (which represents actual train-bridge systems and considers the roughness of
the involved track system) fused with vibration measurements collected from traversing trains. |
