Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) Rail Monitoring

Geodaq provided design, implementation and monitoring of running rail and support ties within the BART tube located below the San Francisco Bay in California.

• Services included design of a 64-channel high-speed data collection system running 24/7 with synchronized video camera capable of triggering on each train passage and capturing strain and displacement of steel rails and concrete ties.
• About 280 trains traverse the test section each day and each train passage dataset includes over 1,000,000 data points. The data collection system was fully automated and operated remotely using Geodaq’s WebSoft ® application for viewing plots, video, and data analytics.
• Steel rails were instrumented with Geodaq Model SS4 strain gauge sensors to monitor dynamic shear strains in both vertical and horizontal directions.
• Dynamic displacement transducers were used to monitor lateral, horizontal and vertical movements as well as rotations of concrete ties supporting the steel rails.
• All 64 sensors were continuously monitored at sample rates between 1000 and 2000 Hz controlled by data acquisition software developed by Geodaq triggering and capturing only relevant data for each train passage.
• Proprietary software algorithms were developed to learn characteristic baseline and dynamic behavior and identify train passage data signatures outside of acceptable behavior patterns.