The Intelligent Rail Summit 2022 kicked off earlier on Wednesday with a technical site visit to Winterthur in Switzerland, where voestalpine RailWay Systems has installed an Acoustic Monitoring Sensor system.

Participants where welcomed by voestalpine Railway Systems experts on site, for an explanation about the software suite of the monitoring solution as well as for a briefing about the sensor system itself.

“The function Acoustic Monitoring Sensor is a highly sensitive measurement system that collects the acoustic signature of each bearing of a passing train”, the company explained. “Defects associated with the individual components of both tapered and cylindrical roller bearings are detected at an early stage and trends for each monitored bearing are provided.”

Alarms are then generated at user-defined tolerance levels, which supports efficient wheel set maintenance programs. “Monitoring of the health of bearings during train operations provides a valuable source of information for optimising maintenance and overhaul intervals of wheel sets.”

In addition to bearing defects, future phases of development will identify wheel defects, locomotive engine defects and locomotive drive train defects.

The conference programma of the Intelligent Rail Summit will start on Wednesday afternoon and will run throughout Thursday as well, with presentations by the likes of Rail Baltica, SBB, ProRail, NS, VR FleetCare, voestalpine Railway Systems and many more.