Measurement-based Condition Monitoring of Railway Signaling Cables

Abstract

We propose a composite diagnostics solution for railway infrastructure monitoring. In particular, we address the issue of soft-fault detection in underground railway cables. We first demonstrate the feasibility of an orthogonal multitone time domain reflectometry based fault detection and location method for railway cabling infrastructure by implementing it using software defined radios. Our practical implementation, comprehensive measurement campaign, and our measurement results guide the design of our overall composite solution. With several diagnostics solutions available in the literature, our conglomerated method presents a technique to consolidate results from multiple diagnostics methods to provide an accurate assessment of underground cable health. We present a Bayesian framework based cable health index computation technique that indicates the extent of degradation that a cable is subject to at any stage during its lifespan. We present the performance results of our proposed solution using real-world measurements to demonstrate its effectiveness.

Characterization and Anomaly Reasoning in Signaling & Power Cables

“…I NTERNET OF THINGS (IoT) based condition monitoring in railway infrastructure is proposed in the literature. [1]- [3]. While the signaling cable infrastructure deployment can be completed at a rapid pace, the efficient railway operation requires tight monitoring of these underground cables to ensure they are free from rodent attacks, water, and chemical corrosion related issues [4].…”

“…Our Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) sensor utilizes a tool called "open-plc-utils" [10] which is currently available to probe Qualcomm chipset-based PLC transceivers ( Eg., QCA 7500 Fig. 2: SNR measured using COTS PLC modem shows a 6 dB difference between healthy and small fault cable states, while an 8dB difference is observed between healthy and large fault cable states at the frequency carrier number 820 [1]. The blue, magenta, and black color represent healthy, small fault, and large fault cable states, respectively.…”