Measurement of train speed based on the cross-correlation of accelerometers signals

One of the most important tasks to evaluate the reliability and safety of railway transportation in terms of derailment risk, is monitoring the infrastructure condition. Several on-board high-performance devices are used in order to accomplish this task, among which accelerometers mounted on axle-box are recently gaining an increasing interest. Aim of this paper is to identify a numerical procedure able to reconstruct the instantaneous forward speed of a rail vehicle from axle-box acceleration measured data collected by mean of the gravitational accelerometer sensors. The preliminary validation of the proposed method has been carried out on a set of virtual accelerometer recordings generated by a numerical multi-body simulation code. It is believed that, within a more extended modelling framework, the speed profile reconstruction so far obtained will help in detecting critical locations with respect to the derailment risk