Identification of Vibration Frequencies of Railway Bridges from Train-Mounted Sensors Using Wavelet Transformation

This article presents a novel methodology to extract the bridge frequencies from the vibrations recorded on train-mounted sensors. Continuous wavelet transform is used to distinguish the bridge frequencies from the other peaks that are visible in the Fourier amplitude spectrum of the accelerations recorded on train bogies. The efficacy of the proposed method is demonstrated through numerical case studies. For this, a detailed three-dimensional finite element model that can capture the vibration characteristics of the bridge, track, and train is created, and each component of the model is separately validated. The train model used is a three-dimensional multi-degree-of-freedom system that can simulate the pitching and rolling behavior. The train was then virtually driven over the bridge at different speeds and under varying track irregularities to evaluate the robustness of the proposed method in extracting bridge frequencies from train-mounted sensors under different conditions. The proposed methodology is shown to be capable of identifying bridge modal frequencies even for aggressive track irregularity profiles and relatively high speeds of trains.