Design and Development of Structural Health Monitoring System for Smart Railroad-Gauge-Facility Using FBG Sensors.

A gauge-changeable system in railways can be a better solution for the fast and safe railway transportation between two countries with different gauges than transshipment or bogie-changing at the border of each country. Especially in South Korea, it is very essential for connecting the trans-Korean railway with the transcontinental railway effectively. So far, conventional type sensors like gap sensors or strain gauges have been used for the monitoring system during gauge change processes. Because they are also based on electric type sensors, they could not be free from electromagnetic interference (EMI) under high-voltage electric power feeding system in modern railways. In this paper, a novel and simple real-time monitoring system in the gauge change facilities is developed by using fiber optic sensors, especially FBG (Fiber Bragg Grating) sensors, and a graphic user interface (GUI) software. The system shows the whole gauge change process successfully in real-time including its malfunction to the operator. The performance of this system, based on fiber Bragg grating (FBG) sensor technology, is successfully verified through a 1/6 subscale model test. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]