Mechanical health assessment of a railway traction system

The AC electrical machines have been used in railway traction systems for about 40 years ago. The main advantage of this choice is to discard the power limitation and permits high power light-weight drives. This enable constructor to achieve higher traction speed and this area now is in permanent development. In this way, the security and reliability of the system becomes more important. The railway traction has a complex structure and the diagnosis of the electromechanical system based on non invasive electrical sensors becomes the interest of research in recent years. In this paper, a test-bed based on a real traction bogie is proposed to study machine current signature analysis for mechanical condition monitoring.