On tailored signal processing tools for operational condition monitoring of railway switches and crossings

Paper in proceedings, 2021

Railway switches and crossings (S&C, turnout) connect different track sections and create a railway network by allowing for trains to change between tracks. This functionality comes at a cost, however, as load-inducing rail discontinuities in the switch and crossing panels cause much larger degradation rates for S&C compared to regular track. As there are hundreds of thousands of S&C in Europe, railway administrators are interested to advance solutions for reliable and resilient maintenance of these assets via remote condition monitoring. One such solution is to measure accelerations using embedded sensors mounted on the sleeper that lies underneath the crossing transition. With the adoption of this solution, this paper addresses the development of tailored signal processing tools for specifically analysing and evaluating the given acceleration signals. In particular, the methodology addresses both temporal and frequency characteristics of measured accelerations, and their integration to displacements. In this work, measured accelerations from 41 train passages and two different crossing panels have been used.