Measurement system for railway track condition monitoring

Abstract

The report encompasses a number of problems concerning the use of integrated inertial technologies for dynamic diagnostics of railway track. Development of high-speed railroad transport in Russia imposes strict requirements to the railway flaw detection systems. Most of all those requirements apply to the measurement of dynamic interaction between the rail car and the railway. Our research allowed us to produce requirements to the inertial measurement sensors and systems installed on various parts of the rail car: bogie's frame and axle boxes. The Railway Track Diagnostics System (RTDS) was used as the core of the integrated navigation and positioning system. The RTDS system was designed in our department of Laser measurement and navigation systems and was successfully implemented on Russian Railways. One of its parts is a set of MEMS sensors which was initially meant to detect short-distance (pulse) geometric railway flaws. After the system was brought to a real car, operational testing showed that these sensors can be used as rail joint detectors, effectively turning them into high-precision ATON markers. Combined with the (already developed) mathematical model of odometer error, this allows to achieve needed accuracy in railway navigation.