Axlebox accelerations: Their acquisition and time–frequency characterisation for railway track monitoring purposes

Railway track maintenance is becoming a real challenge for Railway Engineers due to the need of meeting increasingly high quality requirements by means of cost-effective procedures. Frequently, this can be only achieved by implementing some technological developments from other fields into the railway sector, such as Digital Signal Processing. Indeed, the present work delves into data acquisition and processing techniques in order to enhance track surveying processes. For this purpose, run tests on the Metropolitan Rail Network of Valencia (Spain) were carried out, and axlebox accelerations were gathered and analysed in different ways. The results determined the optimal sampling and filtering frequencies as well as the location of accelerometers along the train. Furthermore, by means of spectral analysis and time–frequency representations, diverse track defects, track singularities and vibration modes can be clearly identified. It is shown how, with a Hamming time window of 0.5 s and an overlapping of 95%, a wide set of track defects can be detected, without the need of complementary analyses. These values yield the best results as they are a good compromise between time and frequency resolution and allow for appropriate pattern recognition of the corresponding track singularities and resonant frequencies.