Dynamic diagnosis method and quantitative characterization of rail corrugation

Abstract

This paper describes a dynamic and quantitative method of diagnosing and estimating rail corrugation in railway tracks using acceleration data obtained from high-speed comprehensive inspection train. Although the amplitude of rail corrugation is small, it will arouse violent vibration between the wheel and rail under high-speed conditions, and accelerate the structural damage of track-vehicle system components. Combined with high-frequency Axle Box Acceleration (ABA), a time-frequency analysis-based Rail Corrugation Index and Energy Factor method are proposed to diagnose the rail corrugation of high-speed railway. The corrugation amplitude is estimated by the quadratic integral of filtered ABA. The new evaluation method uses the windowed energy index signal of the ABA to replace the original signal, and demodulates the high-frequency discrete response signal into a stable low-frequency energy signal without losing the vibration characteristics. Inverse SSTFT is applied to estimate the amplitude of rail corrugation. High-speed railway application results show that the proposed index can effectively diagnose the rail corrugation dynamically and quantitatively and estimate the degree of it.