Trends in vibration-based structural health monitoring of railway sleepers

Today vibration-based structural health monitoring (SHM) has been widely used in many applications, i.e. mechanical, civil, or aerospace engineering. Over last decades, SHM has been investigated for uses in those applications as an alternative tool to the costly visual inspections. Most of the SMH applications make effective use of experimental modal analysis and finite element model updating whereas this approach consumes reasonable cost for instrumentation and device (generally only a few accelerometers installed on the structure). In railway communities however, SHM technologies have not been widely adopted as the rail track engineers lack efficient tools and instrumentation to process the SHM for enormous numbers of railway sleepers along the rail tracks. Even though the new innovations for vibration based SHM, which can provide capabilities of measuring new types of data quantities, increased computational power, data rate transfers and data storage, faster data mining, and artificial intelligence for data processing (e.g. wireless and embedded sensors, fibre optical sensors, new dynamic strain gauges, etc.), have been discovered for some years, it is found that the adoption of SHM in railway tracks, especially for railway sleepers, is still very limited.