Experimental Setup of integrated Wireless Accelerometer Network with LTE Gateway for a Rail Car Body Health Monitoring Application

Train is one of the most popular transportation means in the world and card body improvements focus in reducing its weight. As such, composite material parts substitute car body metal parts based on their lightness among others. New trains will contain heterogeneous parts made of composite material as well as metal. Such heterogeneous joints, require Structural Health Monitoring, to ensure good structural health and correct position. Structural Health Monitoring is a significant tool to assess the health of the car body. Being in the form of wireless accelerometer sensing network, it can ideally be employed to perform the continuous health monitoring task. In this paper we present a dual wireless and telecommunication solution of accelerometers and gyroscopes sensing network, whereby the car body is assumed to be monitored with Wi-Fi enabled devices and the data be sent to a dedicated server by Long Term Evolution connectivity. We present the overall experimental setup of such a system, which extends from the sensing to storing the data to a database residing in the server. We provide initial results of the accelerometers and the gyroscopes in laboratory trials to examine the communication between the system components