Real-time monitoring of railway traffic using slope-assisted Brillouin distributed sensors

The application of a Brillouin distributed sensor for the monitoring of railway traffic is presented in this work. The field test is performed on the Italian regional line San Severo-Peschici, operated by Ferrovie del Gargano. A single-mode optical fiber sensor was attached along a rail length of about 60 m. The strain associated with train passage was acquired along the monitored rail length at 31 Hz acquisition rate and 1 m spatial resolution. The data acquired by the sensor demonstrates its capability of retrieving useful information in railway traffic monitoring, such as train identification, axle counting, speed detection, and dynamic load calculation.