Composite railway health monitoring system based on fiber optic bragg grating sensing array

During the long-time working circle, railroad transport system will be damaged to a certain degree caused by the wearing, the impact, the loads, the climate and so on. In order to monitor the health of the railways and reduce the potential losses, many effective methods are used in railway health monitoring, but few of the techniques can reach the demand of the comprehensive inspection such as operating the rail-inspection and wheel-inspection at the same time. A monitoring scheme for the railway health based on composite sensing technique has been investigated in this paper. The system discussed in the article is based on the fiber Bragg grating (FBG) sensor array. By collecting and analyzing the data from the sensors which are distributed on rails and bodies, we can evaluate the speed, loads and traffic status of trains.