Ricerc@Sapienza

Summary-The European rail sector has a strong interest in innovations for monitoring the operational condition of a running vehicle. Many high technology systems can lead up to future rail systems relying on “intelligent vehicles”. This document describes the conceptual development of a monitoring system based on FEM calculations. The system uses signals from wheel-fitted transducers.

In-service wheel-rail contact force measurements are increasingly being performed with both on-board and wayside systems for various purposes, such as identifying problems on single vehicles (overloading and unbalance, wheel flats etc.) and enabling predictive maintenance of components. Such a wealth of measurements can be expected not only to fulfil their original purposes, but also to steadily fill in vehicle-track interaction knowledge gaps if properly exploited - e.g. with a big-data approach.