Smart Sensing System for Railway Monitoring

This contribution presents a novel smart sensing solution for obtaining operational information from railway trackside. The proposed system consists of strain-based active MFC sensors mounted directly on a rail, that are used to collect data from vibrations and via tailored electronics and wireless transmission systems send them to a cloud-based storage system for further processing. The entire system operates in an ultra-low power regime and allows for automatic threshold-based triggering and data acquisition while being powered either externally or by energy harvesting systems. Acquired signals are stored and processed on a remote server in close to real-time manner to provide operational information about the track and the passing train, detects failures or events endangering the safety of operation, as well as evaluate long-term changes for predictive maintenance purposes. The presented system has been successfully deployed on multiple sites across Czech Republic and Taiwan, an in its current state could already present a competitive solution for automatic operational and health monitoring of railways.