Track irregularities estimation based on the vibration of car-body

Track irregularities have a significant effect on ride quality and traffic safety. The inspection of track irregularity mainly relies on special track inspection car which has a high cost and long inspection period in China. In this paper, a simple method, which can be used on the ordinary train as a good complement to track inspection car, is proposed to on-line estimate the track status. Track quality index (TQI), which is an important evaluation index of line inspection in Chinese railway system, can be estimated by analyzing the vibration of car-body. Some features, including four from time-domain and eight from frequency-domain, are extracted from lateral and vertical acceleration of car-body to regress TQI value by multiple linear regression method A CRH2 trailer car dynamics simulation model is built to verify our method. The effectiveness of the method is verified by simulation experiments with actual track irregularity data in Beijing-Guangzhou line, as all the estimated TQI values are consistent with the actual values.