Abstract
This paper presents a reliability analysis of S-bonds for AF track circuits, which detect train movement and transmit a speed control signal to the train. Field survey shows that S-bonds are exposed to very large vibrations transferred from rail, and suffer from frequent failures when they were installed on ballasted track. We collected the time-to-failure data of S-bonds from the maintenance field of Seoul metro line 2, and made a parametric approach to estimate the statistical distribution that fits the time-to-failure data. The analysis shows that S-bonds have time-to-failure characteristics described by Weibull distribution. The estimated shape parameter of Weibull distribution is 1.1, which means the distribution has constant failure rate characteristics like exponential distribution. The reliability function, hazard function, percentiles and mean lifetime are derived for maintenance support.
