Abstract:
As of 2019, the nation's railroads have delivered a total of 4.38 billion tons of freight. A significant number of current piers are light piers built earlier, and are often deflected due to their limited lateral stiffness. The deflection of piers is getting increasingly evident as the line speeds up and freight increases. On the other hand, the railroad requires a high deformity of train tracks to avoid derailment. Hence, a method is in need that can monitor the track displacement in harsh environments timely and continuously. Current methods depend on costly machines and accurate models which are available only under good weather conditions. It presents a technique to track the lateral movement of light piers with accelerometers. It utilizes low-cost and easy-to-mount accelerometers for persistent and reliable detection of high-dynamic and low-frequency pseudo-static displacements. A novel shaking table is built and the concept is proven by numerical experiments. Compared with the linear follower displacement meter, the peak error is 11.80% and the mean error is 8.05%.