Development of an Reliable SHM System for Damage Monitoring of Railway Axles using FPGAs

Structural health monitoring (SHM) is an effective tool for ensuring integrity and safety, capable of detecting damage with high precision. The computing architecture of Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) allows for programmable and reconfigurable hardware, offering flexibility and adaptability. Combining the real-time, low-latency computational capabilities of FPGAs with SHM systems represents a promising approach in safety-critical embedded systems. This paper proposes an ultrasonic-based SHM system for monitoring damage in railway axles using FPGAs. The proposed SHM system includes a hardware trigger mechanism that uses an incremental encoder to initiate measurements at specific angular positions of the axle. Additionally, a data transfer system will be designed and implemented to reliably transfer measurement and meta data to the system's memory in real-time. The individual hardware components of the proposed system have been simulated using Xilinx Vivado, and the complete hardware system has been evaluated using Zynq 7020 System-on-Chip (SoC) FPGA board. While the system is specifically designed for monitoring railway axles, it can also be applied to other types of axles.