Looseness Detection of Rail Fasteners Using MEMS Sensor and Power Spectrum Entropy

Rail fasteners, a key component of a railway track, are used to connect the rail and the sub-rail foundation together with the required degree of elasticity. Severely loose or failed fasteners may lead to serious safety hazards for rail transportation. However, current strategies for determining fastener looseness are mainly implemented manually, which is labor-intensive, inefficient and less-than-objective. In this paper, we propose a system that uses a MEMS acceleration meter and a wireless data transmission technique to detect railway fasteners. Vibration was generated by hitting the rail with a hammer. Then the acceleration data was transmitted to the cloud by the Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) technique. The fastener looseness was analyzed using power spectrum entropy and frequency domain analysis. Results from the field experiments show that our method can identify the fastener's loosening state accurately and automatically. This wireless, low-cost fastener inspection system is expected to provide an effective approach to improving the efficiency of regular railway maintenance..