Smartness for Railway Transducers: Reliability Experimental Verifications and Accuracy

The development of electrical trains has been requiring advances in the construction of components that are usually supervised by smart systems. Safety aspects are given to redundant capabilities of the new equipments to overcome failures. The new components must obey to internationally recognized standards. For that reason, the electrical supply and the mechanical contacts between train and rails are the key issues to be supervised. The current ISO/IEC/IEEE 1451 is basically helpful for the electrical supply by means of the dedicated transducers. In this paper, a new voltage/current transducer for the train supply is shown and analyzed paying the attention on its reliability, availability, maintainability, and safety approach performed in an innovative way with a specific reference to guidelines of the ISO/IEC/IEEE 1451. At this aim, an extensive theoretical and experimental analysis has been performed using dedicated algorithms developed for the purposes of this research considering reliability aspects according to commercial and defense industry needs.