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High-speed railways services nowadays represent a quarter of all traffic in the EU. Manufacturing trains at lower costs, while ensuring them to be friendly to the environment, and capable to operate for long times, has become mandatory.
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To achieve these goals manufactures have to fight against oversizing and dead weights. At the same time trains must maintain the highest safety levels. Still, maintenance is performed on-schedule and is operator dependent. As a consequence, the demand of instruments able to assess structural health in real-time is rising fast. This is due to the time required for trains’ inspection to detect pantograph, wheel and bogie damages. Since this safety critical task cannot be performed on running consists, it impinges on companies’ performance increasing vehicle unavailability.
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Intelligent Structures eases these problems by introducing a network of small embedded sensors directly into pantographs, bogies and wheels. Our sensors are as small as a coin, as light as a sheet of paper and consume such a small amount of power that they can be powered using a short distance wireless energy link.
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By including these sensors in new designs or by retrofitting existing trains, manufactures will be able to add auto-diagnosis capabilities by efficiently performing precise damage event detection. This will pave the road to a shift in the maintenance paradigm, from on-schedule to on-condition.
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