Maintenance-free condition monitoring system based on lora

TL;DR

This paper presents a maintenance-free, wireless railroad track monitoring system using LoRa technology, significantly reducing costs and increasing monitoring efficiency for rail health management.

Contribution

It introduces a novel maintenance-free wireless monitoring system based on LoRa, integrating sensors and cloud communication for real-time rail condition assessment.

Findings

Achieved 0.01 g acceleration resolution.

Reduced maintenance costs by about 70%.

Enhanced monitoring efficiency by over 5 times.

Abstract

With the rising volume of railroad transportation, the traditional track inspection mainly relies on manual inspection and large-scale inspection equipment, which not only has low inspection frequency and lagging response, but also has the defects of high risk, high cost and easy to miss inspection. To this end, this study designs and realizes a maintenance-free railroad track wireless monitoring system based on LoRa module LM401. Each monitoring node consists of an STM32 microcontroller, an LM401 LoRa transceiver, a low-power ADXL362 triaxial acceleration sensor, a digital temperature sensor (LMT85), and a digital barometric pressure sensor (RSCM17100KP101). The system collects vibration data through the SPI1 interface at the node end, periodically reads the temperature and barometric pressure information, and packages and sends the data to a centralized gateway within a range of 500 m using the LoRa star topology; the gateway then uploads the data in real time to a cloud server through a 4G module, which supports the MQTT protocol. MQTT protocol is supported. Laboratory tests and field deployments show that the system can realize acceleration resolution of 0.01 g, reduce maintenance cost by about 70%, and improve monitoring efficiency by more than 5 times. The system provides a reliable means for intelligent rail health management, and in the future, it is planned to introduce RF energy collection technology to realize automatic wake-up without battery, and expand to urban bridges, tunnels and environmental monitoring and other multi-scenario applications.