On the Development of a Diagnostic System for Condition Based Maintenance of Passenger Trains

Condition Based Maintenance (CBM) is rapidly becoming an essential tool in the railway industry to reach new standards in the maintenance practice of rail vehicles. Health monitoring system are essential to reach this goal, nonetheless they are still lacking on most commercial trains. In this work a wireless monitoring system is developed to retrofit passenger vehicles with a cheap, easy to install and independent instrumentation. The architecture of the system and the main features of the wireless sensors are presented in the work. Exemplary data collected by the system in a field campaign on a passenger vehicle are proposed. These data can be used to monitor the vehicle dynamics and to perform diagnostic activities on the suspensions.