Monitoring of ground and building vibrations caused by train wheel defects

This paper describes a study performed on train wheel defects and their effect on rail vibrations. The paper describes a test setup allowing the researchers to capture ground vibrations at the desired level of detail to prove to what extend wheel quality influences ground vibration levels and associated nuisance to people. The analysis of the measurement signals shows that the individual axles of a passing train can be detected excellently with the signal from the axle detection and the vibration sensors. The signals from various sensors in the measurement setup are synchronized with high time accuracy, making it possible to overlay the time interval of an axis passage over the signal from the vibration measurements. This makes it possible to track vibrations at bogie and axle level. The distance of measurement points from the track is ultimately the determining factor for the extent to which vibrations are dominated by an axle, a bogie, a wagon or the entire train. In addition, direct wheel roundness measurements have been performed for trains that appear to have defect wheels based on ground vibration data. With the track based measurements, the ground vibration measurements and the direct wheel measurements an unique data set has been generated, allowing for an evaluation of the importance of defect train wheel from the perspective of vibrations nuisance to the environment. Relations of measured vibrations to other parameters, both rolling stock related and environmental parameters were investigated based on the generated set of data. The analysis on the data reveals interesting relations between train wheel parameters and ground vibrations, which are discussed in this paper.