ELECTRIFICATION
Productivity and environmental issues clash
At long last, the UK government has invested money and commitment into the electrification of large sections of the British rail network. Whilst there are many virtues, we have to pay the price of a significant environmental impact of high levels of noise pollution created by the recently approved piling methods. Caleb Taylor, Soundex European and export sales manager of Raven Group, reports on the available solution for attenuation.
F
ollowing investment into the rail infrastructure within the UK, electrification
of the North West and Great Western Main Line network is progressing fast. Electrifying these key routes on the railway will mean faster, greener, quieter and more reliable journeys for thousands of passengers.
The implementation of this infrastructure has seen the approval of a piling process comprised of two elements. Primarily,
the standard
610mm (24”) diameter UK Network Rail piles are pitched with a side-grip vibrator and driven until this attachment reaches its limit.
The second stage involves a hydraulic hammer that is pinned to the excavator bucket linkage, which finally drives the pile to track level at the height determined by the needs of the embankment or cutting. During this process, noise levels can often be recorded anywhere
above 95dB.
With a very high proportion of the electrification being installed on main lines, night closures are often the only feasible way this can be implemented. Complaints of excessive noise at these unsociable hours have already started flowing in to the respective local councils. Besides the environmental issue itself, it has the potential to lead to loss of efficiency, money, reputation, programme delays and a serious breakdown in customer relationships.
Noise mitigation to any meaningful level of these processes has been either virtually impossible or extremely impractical until the Soundex R&D team within Raven Group came up with a very simple yet comprehensive solution.
It is a two-part system that comprises of a
Soundex acoustic shield for the hammer, and a set of self-attaching Soundex modular attenuators for the steel cylindrical pile. This beautifully simple solution attenuates not only the impact noise created within the hydraulic hammer, but also the resonating noise that emanates from the pile following each impact. This contributes significantly in reducing the noise pollution whilst remaining practical, functional and retaining the visibility required during the piling process.
After extensive investment in R&D, this solution represents a small but significant part of the large range of Soundex acoustic options available from Raven Group’s distributor network. It was recently exhibited at the Rail Live show and heralded as revolutionary.
FOR MORE INFORMATION
T: 0844 901 6622 E:
enquiries@soundexsolutions.com
The butterfly effect on the railway T
Alastair Norman, head of asset condition monitoring at telent, discusses asset failure in the rail sector.
he idea that the path of an enormous event like a hurricane could be altered by a tiny
detail elsewhere, like a butterfly flapping its wings, was named ‘the butterfly effect’ by mathematician, meteorologist and chaos theory expert Edward Lorenz in the 1960s. Similarly, the idea of a butterfly causing tiny ripples resulting in vast differences later is the subject of Ray Bradbury’s science fiction work, ‘A Sound of Thunder’.
Whilst butterflies aren’t known to cause
particular problems on the nation’s rail and underground networks, it is possible that monitoring tiny changes in the state of components within larger station assets, like lifts and escalators, can be used to predict and prevent failures which would otherwise lead to breakdown, expensive and inconvenient maintenance and travel disruption.
At telent, we have developed systems that monitor and analyse such tiny changes in order to improve asset performance for our customers.
Some components fail gradually and predictably. We use sensors to measure variables such as vibration, temperature and voltage. This enables us to monitor small changes that indicate the early signs of failure – then prevent problems before they occur.
The knowledge gained from the data enables customers to plan preventative maintenance in a more intelligent and proactive way according to the data gathered, rather than on a periodic basis. Our system enables them to view the per- formance of their assets via the internet, as well as receive email and text alerts predicting po- tential failures. As a result, asset performance
50 | rail technology magazine Jun/Jul 14
is improved and maintenance costs are dra- matically reduced, so the system offers a rapid return on investment. As well as offering cost savings for the customer, the system saves time and re- duces dis- ruption for travellers.
telent is also a member of a consor- tium that has been awar ded funding from the ‘Enabling the Digital Rail- way’ competition – a research programme funded jointly by the UK’s innovation agency, the Technology Strategy Board, and the RSSB. The group includes London Underground, Humaware, the University of Nottingham and Loughborough University and the project fo- cuses on the ‘Health and Prognostic Assess- ment of Railway Assets for Predictive Mainte- nance’.
W:
www.telent.com FOR MORE INFORMATION
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