Damage Detection of Railroad Tracks Using Piezoelectric Sensors

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Piezoelectric sensor-based health monitoring technique using a two-step support vector machine (SYM) classifier is discussed for damage identification of a railroad track. An active sensing system composed of two PZT patches was investigated in conjunction with both impedance and guided wave propagation methods to detect two kinds of damage of the railroad track (one is a hole damage of 0.5cm in diameter at web section and the other is a transverse cut damage of 7.5cm in length and 0.5cm in depth at head section). Two damage-sensitive features were extracted one by one from each method; a) feature I: root mean square deviations (RMSD) of impedance signatures and b) feature II: wavelet coefficients for $A_0$ mode of guided waves. By defining damage indices from those damage-sensitive features, a two-dimensional damage feature (2-D DF) space was made. In order to minimize a false-positive indication of the current active sensing system, a two-step SYM classifier was applied to the 2-D DF space. As a result, optimal separable hyper-planes were successfully established by the two-step SYM classifier: Damage detection was accomplished by the first step-SYM, and damage classification was also carried out by the second step-SYM. Finally, the applicability of the proposed two-step SYM classifier has been verified by thirty test patterns.