Date and time: 26-05-2023 14:30
Location: Lecture Hall C
Topic: Assessment of turnout crossing degradation
Description: Turnouts introduce flexibility into railway networks but are relative sensitive railway components. Rising demand for capacity, higher speeds, higher axle loads and less time for maintenance pressures the reliability of turnouts. Especially a fixed crossing that facilitates the physical intersection of two rails is vulnerable. It contains a discontinuity that causes large impact forces potentially leading to an abrupt failure and large disruptions. This gives rise to the question if failures and the following disruptions can be prevented or mitigated by timely maintenance. Passenger trains cover a large extend of the Dutch network at a daily basis and therefore they can serve as a platform for frequent infrastructure monitoring. A potential infrastructure monitoring technology that is applicable to retrofit is on passenger trains is Axle Box Accelerations. By having two intercity trains of NS retrofitted with this system, an assessment method is developed to determine the crossing health based on measurements conducted by in-service passenger trains.
Track: Structural Engineering
