Improved condition monitoring system to protect railway axle bearing safety from electric corrosion

Axle bearing is a critical machine element in the railway system to the operation reliability and safety in the transportation. The failure of the axle bearing can lead to derailment. In order to assure the transportation safety, this paper discusses the cause of the axel bearing failure, and proposes the counter measurement to reduce the risk. Due to the failure of previous implemented counter-measurement, this paper suggest implementing the condition monitoring system to monitor the axle bearing, aiming to confine the bearing failure in control. In order to improve the failure diagnosis accuracy, this paper suggests collecting signal from various perspectives, for example, vibration, current, voltage, temperature etc. on the axle bearing for the condition monitoring system. The various signals should be analysed by using physical model and data driven model, for the maintenance policy optimization.