Innovative Technologies for Railway Track Switches

In this extended abstract paper, a few of the developed switches and crossings (S&C) mechatronic technologies within the Switch and Crossing Optimal Design Evaluation (S-CODE) project will be presented, where they were titled as demonstrators. Current conventional S&C are working for a long time with reasonable performances. They kept their mechanism with little changes. However, there are still many drawbacks that should be dealt with, especially its reliability and safety. Thus, the S-CODE project looked at developing radical future S&C technologies that can be integrated into existing rail network platforms, but also can achieve significant improved performances. These technologies will either accommodate potential faults in S&C through integrating condition monitoring (CM) and/or a fault tolerant control (FTC) strategies, in addition to define the optimal locations for sensors to be placed; or completely propose new actuating mechanisms (i.e., high redundancy actuator (HRA) and Maglev actuator); and/or consider a novel locking concept that base on the magneto-rheological fluid (MR) damper to improve railway track switching performances, especially with the strong tendency to introduce high-speed trains.