Condition Monitoring of NFR Trains With Measurements From a Single Wayside 3D Vibration Sensor

The work reported in this paper aims at developing a simple one sensor based system to achieve condition monitoring of NFR (Northeast Frontier Railway, India) trains. Vibration of a railway track under train in motion provides important information about the train.To capture the vibration of a track under train in motion, vibration sensor ADXL335 is selected, as it is a reliable vibration sensor. Moreover ADXL335 shows insignificant effect of temperature on its measurements.Therefore it is considered to be suitable for measurement of vibration of a railway track under train in motion, because the temperature experienced by the sensor would vary during the train in motion as well as due to change in weather condition. To capture and store vibration data, an embedded system has been developed using Arduino Uno board. ADXL335 sensor is interfaced to the Arduino Uno board and software has been developed to capture 3D vibration of a railway track under train in motion. The captured data is transferred and stored in a laptop which is interfaced to the Arduino Uno board through USB port.The vibration data stored in the laptop is utilized to analyse the condition of the train using signal processing techniques. Time-domain and frequency-domain analysis of the vibration signals captured by ADXL335 installed in a railway track have been carried out to determine the condition of a train in motion. It has been observed that the time-domain analysis can provide information about slip and derailment tendency of a train, whereas frequency domain analysis can provide condition of different components of a train.