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Sensor Network Design Technique for Monitoring Railroad Structures
Abstract
Components of high speed trains such as bolsters and bogie are subjected to continuous dynamic loads under varying environmental and operational conditions. Scheduled maintenance of these components at regular intervals is not feasible as these inspections are costly, burdensome, and increase structural downtime. Moreover these conventional inspections require dis-assembly of different components of the train structure. Oftentimes these dis-assemble and re-assemble operations leads to new damage initiation if these operations are not followed correctly. Structural Heath Monitoring (SHM) technologies are ideal solutions to monitor this kind of critical structure. Guided Wave-based Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) techniques are currently widely used in aerospace and energy industries to monitor structural damages such as fatigue crack, delamination, debond, and corrosion etc. The damage detection sensitivity of any SHM technique highly depends on the sensor network design. This paper presents model-based quantification technique to design and verify the performance of the sensor network. In a joint program between the CRRC and Acellent Technologies, sensor network design techniques were demonstrated and validated through case studies on high speed train bolsters.