Railway Infrastructure System Diagnosis Using Empirical Mode Decomposition and Hilbert Transform

This paper introduces a diagnosis scheme of a railway infrastructure component based on a combined use of empirical mode decomposition (EMD) and Hilbert transform. This component is dedicated to track/vehicle transmission referred as track circuit. The aim is to detect its working state from one measurement signal which can be viewed as a superposition of several oscillations and periodic patterns called intrinsic mode functions (IMFs). For this application, it will be shown that physical meaning can be assigned to each mode that EMD tries to extract. Furthermore, when the Hubert transform of the IMFs is performed, we show that the changing of instantaneous frequency can be linked to the existence of defect. The performances are illustrated on both simulated and experimental signals