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Wayside Condition Monitoring System for Railway Wheel Profiles: Applications and Performance Assessment

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Wayside Condition Monitoring System for Railway Wheel Profiles: Applications and Performance Assessment DOCTORAL T H E SIS Matthias Asplund Wayside Condition Monitoring System for Railway Wheel Profiles: Applications and Performance Assessment Applications and Performance Wheel Profiles: Condition Monitoring System for Railway Wayside Asplund Matthias Wayside Condition Monitoring System Department of Civil, Environmental and Natural Resources Engineering Wayside Condition Monitoring Division of Operation, Maintenance and Acoustics for Railway Wheel Profiles: System for Railway Wheel Profiles: Applications and Performance ISSN 1402-1544 ISBN 978-91-7583-745-1 (print) Applications and Performance Assessment ISBN 978-91-7583-746-8 (pdf) Assessment Luleå University of Technology 2016 Matthias Asplund Matthias Asplund Division of Operation, Maintenance and Acoustics LuleåOperation University and of Technology, Maintenance Sweden Wayside Condition Monitoring System for Railway Wheel Profiles: Applications and Performance Assessment Matthias Asplund Luleå University of Technology Department of Civil, Environmental and Natural Resources Engineering Division of Operation, Maintenance and Acoustics Printed by Luleå University of Technology, Graphic Production 2016 ISSN 1402-1544 ISBN 978-91-7583-745-1 (print) ISBN 978-91-7583-746-8 (pdf) Luleå 2016 www.ltu.se PREFACE The research work presented in this thesis was carried out between August 2011 and December 2016 at the Division of Operation and Maintenance Engineering of Luleå University of Technology and Luleå Railway Research Center (JVTC). The interest and financial support of Trafikverket (the Swedish Transport Administration) were the means to this end. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT I would like to express my gratitude to my supervisor, Professor Uday Kumar, and my co- supervisors, Dr Matti Rantatalo and Dr Jing Lin, for the great confidence which they have placed in my capability to conduct this research work, and for all their support through sharing their ideas, proposing improvements, proofreading manuscripts, finding new ways, and always adopting a positive approach. I am grateful to Melker Pettersson, Dr Arne Nissen, Anders Backman, Lars Wikberg, Dr Peter Söderholm, Dr Per-Olof Larsson-Kråik, Dr Stefan Niska, Dr Iman Arasteh Khouy and Dr Anders Carolin, as well as other personnel at Trafikverket, for making this work possible, supporting this research with their ideas and good advice, and providing relevant information. Many thanks are due to Dan Larsson at Damill AB and Ingemar Persson at DEsolver for their assistance by providing a large amount of useful data and information during my research. I am also grateful to all my colleagues in other companies who supported me during the work on this thesis, but who are too many to be mentioned by name. Furthermore, I would like to thank all my colleagues at the Operation and Maintenance Engineering Research Group, especially my co-researcher and friend Stephen Famurewa, for all their support during this project. My deep gratitude is owed to my wife, Anette, and my children, Rebecca, Ruben, Hannah and Jairus, for all the support and confirmation received from them; without them my goal would never have been achieved. Matthias Asplund November 2016 Luleå, Sweden III IV ABSTRACT The railway is an important mode of transport, due to its environmental friendliness, high safety level, and low energy consumption combined with a high transport capacity, among other factors. The Swedish railway network is old, there has been almost no expansion of the network during the past few decades, and more traffic is expected. Therefore, there is currently a demand for more track capacity and, in the short term, the existing network is expected to deliver the increased capacity. The railway operators in the network have a large impact on train delays, and wheel failures are one large contributor of delays. Delays destroy capacity and, therefore, capacity- consuming failures, such as abnormal wheels, need to be minimised. This can be achieved by using appropriate condition monitoring for the wheels on the track to find potential capacity consumers before failures happen. Therefore, the condition of the wheel-rail interface is important, since the state of the wheel influences that of the rail and vice versa. The monitoring of rail profiles is already being performed, but the monitoring of wheel profiles is still in the development phase. This thesis treats the applications and performance assessment of a wheel profile measurement system (WPMS), and presents case studies focusing on its system and measurement performance. The proposed applications concern how the information from the WPMS can be integrated with information from other data sources and with physical models to obtain a true current picture of the wheel behaviour. The thesis investigates the measurement performance of the WPMS by using a paired T-test and a number of quality measures, e.g. the reproducibility and repeatability, the precision-to-tolerance ratio and the signal-to-noise ratio. In conclusion, this thesis shows that the WPMS works well with an expected level of reliability in a harsh climate with respect to its measurement and system performance. By combining other data with the data from the WPMS, potentially abnormal wheels can be found in an early stage if the proposed new maintenance limit for the wheel parameter of the flange height is implemented. Furthermore, through adding a physical model to the process, the real contact condition of the actual wheel-rail interface can be evaluated and measurement deviations can be found. However, the wheel parameters, as well as the entire profile, need a high measurement quality with little variation, which seems to be an issue with respect to the measurement performance when advanced calculations are to be done. Therefore, a new approach for evaluating measurement performance has been developed using established statistical tools and quality measures with predefined acceptance limits; with the help of this approach, one can differentiate between the variation in the measurements originating in the different measurement units and the variation originating in the wheels. This new approach can be applied to judge the measurement performance of wheel profile condition-monitoring systems, and can also be implemented for other condition-monitoring systems to evaluate their measurement performance. Finally, this approach promotes the development of a condition-based maintenance policy by providing more reliable information for maintenance decision makers. V KEYWORDS: condition monitoring, condition-based maintenance, health management, railway system, wheel profile measurement, wheel defect detector, measurement, reproducibility and repeatability, data quality, railway. VI LIST OF APPENDED PAPERS PAPER I Asplund, M., Gustafsson, P., Nordmark, T., Rantatalo, M., Palo, M., Famurewa, M.S., Wandt, K. (2014). “Reliability and measurement accuracy of a condition monitoring system in an extreme climate: a case study of automatic laser scanning for wheel profiles”. Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers. Part F: Journal of Rail and Rapid Transit,Vol. 228(6), pp. 695-704. PAPER II Asplund, M., Palo, M., Famurewa, S., Rantatalo, M. (2014). “A study of railway wheel profile parameters used as indicators of an increased risk of wheel defects”. Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers. Part F: Journal of Rail and Rapid Transit,Vol. 230(4), pp. 323-334. PAPER III Asplund, M., Rantatalo, M. (2016). “Evaluation of wheel profile measurements by means of the contact-point function for the wheel-rail interface”. Submitted. PAPER IV Asplund, M., Lin, J., Rantatalo, M. (2016). “Assessment of the data quality of wayside wheel profile measurements”. International Journal of COMADEM, Vol. 19(3), pp. 19-25. PAPER V Asplund, M., Lin, J. (2016). “Evaluating the measurement capability of a wheel profile measurement system by using GR&R”. Measurement, Vol. 92, pp. 19-27. LIST OF RELATED PAPERS Asplund, M., Famurewa, S.M., Rantatalo, M. (2016). “Data quality assessment of automatic wheel profile measurement systems”. U. Kumar, A. Ahmadi, A. Kumar Verma, & P. Varde (Eds.), Current Trends in Reliability, Availability, Maintainability and Safety: an Industry Perspective. (Pp. 717-738). Springer. (Lecture Notes in Mechanical Engineering.) 10.1007/978-3-319-23597-4_53. Asplund, M., Lin, J., Rantatalo, M. (2015). “Enhancing the quality of data from a wheel profile measurement system: a proposed approach”. Proceedings of International Congress of Condition Monitoring and Diagnostic Engineering Management, December 1-4, Buenos Aires, Argentina. VII Asplund, M., Famurewa, M.S., Rantatalo, M. (2014). “Condition monitoring of railway wheels: study of wheel defect pattern and e-maintenance solution for decision support”. Journal of Quality in Maintenance Engineering, 20(3), pp. 216 - 223. Asplund, M., Famurewa, M.S., Rantatalo, M. (2012). “Prognostic and health management of wheel condition: integration of wheel defect detection and wheel profile monitoring data”. Proceedings of 2nd International Workshop and Congress on eMaintenance, December 12- 14, Luleå, Sweden. Lin, J., Asplund, M. (2014). “Bayesian semi-parametric analysis for locomotive wheel degradation using gamma frailties”. Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers. Part F: Journal of Rail and Rapid Transit, 229(5), pp. 237-247, http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0954409713508759. Lin, J., Asplund, M. (2014). “A comparison study for locomotive wheels’ reliability assessment using the Weibull
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