OMoRail · On-Board Monitoring of In-Service Trains for the Structural Health Monitoring of Railway Bridges

On-Board Monitoring of In-Service Trains for the Structural Health Monitoring of Railway Bridges

Railway bridges represent critical components of the European transport network, enabling safe and efficient mobility of passengers and goods across the continent. Many bridge assets currently in service are ageing and require continuous monitoring in order to ensure safety, optimise maintenance costs, and support the transition towards more sustainable and resilient infrastructure systems. Conventional structural health monitoring systems are often expensive to install and maintain, which limits their large-scale deployment across extensive railway networks. Recent research has demonstrated the potential of so-called mobile monitoring approaches, where vibration measurements recorded on trains crossing a bridge are used to estimate the structural properties of the bridge without installing sensors directly on the structure. Such approaches could enable cost-efficient monitoring of a large number of bridges using existing railway vehicles, but several scientific and technical challenges still prevent their reliable use in practice. These include the influence of operational variability, environmental conditions, modelling uncertainties, and the difficulty of extracting structural information from indirect measurements. The objective of this project is to develop advanced methodologies for the identification and monitoring of railway bridge dynamics using both direct measurements on the structure and indirect measurements obtained from passing trains. The project aims to establish robust data-driven and physics-based approaches to reliably estimate bridge modal properties, integrate monitoring data with numerical models, and quantify uncertainty in the identified parameters. The project pathway to impact focuses on enabling scalable and cost-efficient monitoring strategies for railway infrastructure. The expected results support infrastructure managers, engineering companies, and public authorities in improving maintenance planning, reducing life cycle costs, and increasing the safety and reliability of the European railway network. The project contributes to European priorities related to sustainable mobility, digitalisation of infrastructure, and resilience of transport systems.

Текст от CORDIS, на английски · Данни: CORDIS, © Европейски съюз