Health Condition Monitoring of railway wheels through vibration analysis using the moving RMS

Rail wheels are one of the most important parts of rail vehicles. The presence of damage on the rolling surface of the wheels causes an increase in vibrations in the wheels, and consequently, this can damage other components. Rail systems generally follow a preventive inspection process, which is costly, low-efficiency, time-consuming and prone to human error. Nowadays, condition monitoring based maintenance is preferred for this purpose. In such methods, vibrations, noise or other functional parameters of vehicle components, including wheels, are measured and analyzed. In this study, a method for wheel damage detection by measuring rail vibrations is presented. By measuring the vibrations of the rails through installation of measuring devices, the vibrations caused by the passage of each wheel are recorded. Then, using the Moving Root Mean Square in the time domain, the health condition of the vehicle is monitored. Proper adjustment of related parameters such as window length and overlap in calculating Moving RMS has a great impact on the results. The proposed method is implemented on the measured data. The presence and location of wheel damage was determined successfully.