Automated Wheel Shape Monitor To Detect Wear
The title of this post, is the same as that of this article on Railway Gazzette.
These three paragraphs describe the monitor.
Central Japan Railway has developed a device that allows the shape of wheels to be measured while trains are passing over it at up to 80 km/h.
Following a series of field tests, the equipment is being introduced on JR Central’s Tokyo – Shin Osaka Shinkansen route in the 2025 financial year, ending in March 2026. Similar devices will then be installed for JR Central’s electric rolling stock running on 1 067 mm gauge conventional routes.
The Automatic Wheel Shape Measurement Device is intended to ensure that wheels are reprofiled at the optimal time based on the wear condition of the wheels. Until now reprofiling has been used at regular intervals or after a train has run a specified distance.
I like this monitor and I hope it is a success.
In the early 1970s, I was working for a section in ICI, that developed innovative instruments for chemical plants.
One of the instruments that the section developed, measured the size of a plastic-film bubble using a television camera and then used the result to control the size and the pressure of the bubble.
We need more clever instruments to measure the size of moving objects.
The Anonymous Widower 
The article is not entirely accurate. There have been wheel profile measuring systems that measure and record the profile of the wheel tread for some time now (I reckon 15 years). Most of these are low speed systems usually sited on or near depots, since you are more likely to be interested in the state of the wheel profile prior to it entering the maintenance facility where it can be put on an underfloor wheel lathe.
Not only do these exist but there is a German solution that can be adjusted between low speeds and up to 90km/h.
Comment by fammorris | December 31, 2024 |