Condition monitoring approaches for the detection of railway wheel defects

Condition monitoring systems are commonly exploited to assess the health status of equipment. A fundamental part of any condition monitoring system is data acquisition. Meaningfully estimating the current condition and predicting the future behaviour of the equipment strongly depend on the characteristic of the data measurement stage. Nowadays, condition monitoring has wide applications in the railway industry, and various monitoring approaches have been proposed for the inspection of wheel and rail conditions. In-service condition monitoring of wheels provides the real-time data required for maintenance planning, while in-workshop inspection is normally done at fixed intervals carried out periodically. In-service data acquisition can be divided into on-board and wayside measurements. In this paper, on the basis of these classifications, the existing data acquisition techniques for the monitoring of railway wheel condition are reviewed, and the state-of-the-art methods and required research are discussed.