On-line vibration source detection of running trains based on acceleration measurement

To ensure safety of railway operation, it is important to regularly check railway conditions such as deformation of the rails. To monitor rail deformation, this paper presents a method for detecting sources of vibrations a running train on-line by measuring accelerations, which include the train bogie's lateral acceleration, and the crossbeam's lateral and vertical accelerations. A series of detection algorithms including peak-peak value entropy comparison, weighted correlation coefficients comparison etc. are proposed in the method, according to different characters of vibrations from train itself and rail deformation. To eliminate the vibration due to the train itself, the algorithm employs the peak-peak value entropy comparison. To identify the order of the vibrations between crossbeam and bogie, a weighted correlation coefficient is applied. Weight center and maximum position are used to detect at last. The algorithms were implemented on a passenger train using ARM processor and real experiments were conducted on the train on the railway between Shenyang and Dalian in China. The experiments demonstrated that the proposed method can produce satisfactory results.