Spectral Analysis of Instrumented Ore Car Data for Railway Track Condition Monitoring

Instrumented Ore Cars (IOCs) developed by the Institute of Railway Technology, Monash University have been widely used in railway operations in Australia. The IOC continuously monitors the condition of the track from the response of the vehicle to the track. In this study, side-frame accelerometer data from IOCs was analysed in the spectral domain in order to determine the condition of Insulated Rail Joints (IRJs). Features were extracted from the transformed spectral data as vectors. Clustering was conducted using one of these features and it was found that there was a strong correlation between the cluster numbers and IRJ maintenance records.