An integrated wayside condition monitoring system for axle bearings

The rolling stock traffic density is increasing throughout the British rail network and therefore any operational disruption due to equipment failure is highly undesirable due to the associated costs and delays. The reliability and safety of axle bearings in passenger and freight rolling stock has always been of concern to the rail industry. Hotbox detectors and air-coupled acoustic emission systems used for condition monitoring purposes fail to achieve the accuracy required to eliminate the risk of derailments caused by axle bearing faults as well as allow evolution to condition based maintenance procedures. The COMORAIL project aims to improve existing wayside monitoring capability by developing and implementing an integrated on-line system, which will combine vibration analysis and acoustic emission techniques. Each of these techniques complements the other and therefore increases the overall versatility and accuracy of the integrated online system