Advanced Pressure Sensors for Enhancing Railway Track Safety

The criticality of railway infrastructure reliability in the face of unobserved track degradation threatened by possible catastrophic failures poses a serious risk to passenger safety and drastic economic losses. The traditional techniques of monitoring have limitations, such as low inspection intervals, subjective judgments, and a lack of real-time, comprehensive analysis of the condition of the track. It is a new research project that introduces an innovative distributed pressure sensing system and changes the scenario of railway track integrity monitoring by advanced piezoelectric and fiber optic sensor technologies. The proposed methodology takes advantage of the new multi-layered sensor grid, high-resolution pressure mappings, and combines that with machine learning algorithms offering capabilities for predictive structural health assessment. Experimental validation of the performance of the system on three major railway networks resulted in high performance and generated vital information, such as 92% accurate, timely detection of track structural anomalies; shortening of predictable time for the early detection of future failure cases up to 87%; and unprecedented spatial resolutions of corresponding mechanical stress distributions. The study definitively proves that integrated smart sensor technologies can revolutionize railway safety paradigms through an interventionist approach in the maintenance of structures, reducing risk considerably while improving operational reliability.