Detection of railway wheel and rail diseases based on distributed optical fiber acoustic sensing

This research proposes a real-time detection method for the health status of heavy-haul railways based on distributed fiber optic acoustic sensing (DAS). The DAS system detects the wheel-rail acoustic signals using the communication optical cable along the heavy-haul railway, multiple features are mixed to construct an eigenvector and a classifier to realize the typical disaster identification of the heavy-haul railway. The experimental results show that this system can realize the identification and classification of typical track diseases such as rolling contact fatigue (RCF), corrugation, unsupported sleepers on the railway, the achieved average identification rate of disease events is as high as 97.3%, and the identification time of a single event sample is 1ms. This work can achieve real-time detection of track diseases, which can be used as an important basis for workers to maintain and repair. In addition, the DAS system has also successfully monitored the train's running speed and wheel anomalies status information. This work provides a long-term online monitoring method for rail safety operation and maintenance of railway transportation and monitoring of train running status, and does not require any additional sensor arrangement.