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1887

access icon free Development and testing of an automatic remote condition monitoring system for train wheels

© The Institution of Engineering and Technology
Received 06/03/2015, Accepted 11/11/2015, Revised 05/10/2015, Published 01/02/2016

The safe guidance of railway vehicles is dependent on the contact geometry between the wheel and the rail as defects in the running surface of the wheels can increase the risk of derailments and wheel catastrophic failures, and significantly increase the damage done by the vehicle to the track. An automatic optical based system for detecting wheel defects of rail vehicles passing in service has been developed and tested. The system is described, detailing the process of capturing consistent high resolution and quality images of the wheel tread and flange suitable for processing to detect defects. Tests of the system have been carried out with a wide variety of different rail vehicles, some with defects created artificially on the test wheel to test the image capturing capability of the system and its ability to automatically detect the defects. The prototype system was successfully installed in an operational railway site and captured high-resolution images of the tread and flanges of the entire circumference of rail vehicle wheels as they passed through the system. The system was also shown to be successful at automatically analysing the captured images to detect wheel surface defects.

Inspec keywords: condition monitoring; object detection; image resolution; wheels; computational geometry; railway safety; railways; mechanical testing; mechanical engineering computing

Other keywords: automatic optical based system; operational railway site; image capturing capability; contact geometry; automatic remote condition monitoring system; train wheels; rail vehicles; railway vehicles safe guidance; increase wheel catastrophic risk; wheel defect detection; increase derailments risk

Subjects: Optical, image and video signal processing; Health and safety aspects; Mechanical components; Mechanical engineering applications of IT; Civil and mechanical engineering computing; Testing; Computer vision and image processing techniques; Computing in other engineering fields; Graphics techniques; Maintenance and reliability

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http://iet.metastore.ingenta.com/content/journals/10.1049/iet-its.2015.0041
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