An investigation into wayside hot-box detector efficacy and optimization

Constantine Tarawneh, James Aranda, Veronica Hernandez, Stephen Crown and Joseph Montalvo

International Journal of Rail Transportation, 2020, vol. 8, issue 3, 264-284

Abstract: Wayside hot-box detectors (HBDs) are devices used to assess the health of railcar components including bearings, axles, and brakes by monitoring their temperatures. HBDs use infrared (IR) sensors to record the temperatures of railroad bearings. Bearings that trigger an alarm or exhibit warm trending are removed and sent for inspection. In many cases, no discernable defects were found in the flagged bearings. Motivated by this finding, an investigation was conducted which included performing a controlled field test as well as exhaustive laboratory testing utilizing an HBD simulator. Data acquired from field and laboratory testing was used to evaluate the accuracy and efficacy of wayside HBDs. The results suggest that the scanning location on the bearing cup significantly affects the temperature measurement. Different calibrations for the field- and laboratory-acquired data were also explored. An optimized calibration technique along with proper IR sensor alignment can markedly improve the accuracy of HBD measurements.

Date: 2020
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/23248378.2019.1636721 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:tjrtxx:v:8:y:2020:i:3:p:264-284

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/tjrt20

DOI: 10.1080/23248378.2019.1636721

Access Statistics for this article

International Journal of Rail Transportation is currently edited by Wanming Zhai and Kelvin C. P. Wang

More articles in International Journal of Rail Transportation from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().