New approaches of wayside temperature measurement for railway car fire detection

Abstract

Especially for freight cars, detection of fire mostly requires to establish wayside installed equipment. Because of traveling speeds up to 160km/h, fast and sensitive data acquisition is an important prerequisite. Moreover, fire in closed wagons normally has only small, hardly measurable influence on the outer wagon surface, which requires optimized sensing techniques. One promising approach for reliable fire detection on railroad vehicles is the inspection of their surface temperature. Today's high resolution infrared slit cameras can fulfil all requirements regarding measurement speed, accuracy and temperature range. However, the high camera cost is a major disadvantage in deployment in multiple places along the track. With detailed knowledge of the surface temperature distribution under different fire conditions, cameras may be substituted by temperature sensors, which match the measurement issue better and are cheaper. In this paper the influence of applicable detectors and suitable configurations is discussed