Perpetuum's bogie-mounted vibration and temperature sensors already provide data to Southeastern on rolling stock condition, monitoring over 1.8 million data points on trains serving the county of Kent alone. Since 2013 more than 400 million service-km from more than 5000 sensors have been monitored on over 600 vehicles.
Perpetuum's technology utilises an electromagnetic vibration harvesting micro-generator, which is based on converting mechanical energy produced by vibration into electrical energy and is able to reliably transfer large amounts of autonomous data from wireless sensors.
The sensors also record data on track condition by providing 11,000 snapshots a day on sections of the Southeastern network, which can provide insights into the rate of change. Following 12 months of development work, NR has signed a ongoing contract with Perpetuum.
"The opportunity to bring real-time asset information to both infrastructure managers and rolling stock maintainers from a single device on a passenger train opens up exciting new opportunities for how we manage our railway in the future," says Mr Dave Deeley, NR's special projects manager, South East Performance Improvement Project.
For more on Perpetuum's vibration harvesting technology see the August 2015 edition of IRJ p48, or click here.
