High-speed train speed estimation via one geophone near an high-speed railway

The running high-speed train (HST) stimulates various seismic waves near a high-speed railway (HSR) when it runs on an HSR. Thus the received seismic signal can be further utilized to estimate the HST speed without using any onboard device. Based on the assumption that every carriage of the HST has the same structure, this abstract introduces one convolution model for the track load function and shows the track load function's amplitude spectrum has an equal-interval and multi-narrowband feature. Furthermore, it can be indicated that the HST speed and carriage length determines the interval between two neighboring frequency peaks. Therefore, with only one geophone near the HSR, we propose one robust HST speed estimating method by computing an auto-correlation function of the received signal's amplitude spectrum. The advantage of the proposed method is its robustness, low computation cost, easy implementation, and need only one geophone. One experimental field results show the proposed method's ability to estimate the speed of a passing HST.