Public Funding for Railview Limited

Creation of a rail sub-surface infrastructure inspection test vehicle that will be field-tested to demonstrate strategies for rail infrastructure resilience – INFRAMONIT TEST VEHICLE. This test vehicle builds on the successful Innovate UK INFRAMONIT project and develops the next generation of Rail Subsurface Transport Infrastructure Inspection Radar that will scan below the track surface, into the track bed and beyond and produce 3D images of the rail subsurface infrastructure assets. Once the exact position and the depth of the assets are known accurate asset mapping and monitoring can be undertaken. This test vehicle will reveal defects, failures and technical issues in the assets and the 3D images produced can be used in order to plan preventative maintenance, thereby increasing resilience of the rail infrastructure system. INFRAMONIT TEST VEHICLE responds to the challenge of avoiding infrastructure-based rail disruptions by providing a technology to assess and monitor geotechnical assets providing a better knowledge of those assets and with the potential to provide quantitative data across the whole geotechnical asset portfolio. This will facilitate more informed decision making and prioritisation of intervention through use of consistent data allowing greater intervention before failure and therefore reduced risk of derailment and a reduction in Schedule 8 costs by fixing before disruption and failure. This offers a significant competitive advantage over current state of the art systems which consist of several vertically fixed antennae uniformly positioned along a vehicle’s lateral axis, and are therefore limited to acquiring discrete data transects within the lateral extent of the vehicle. In contrast, the INFRAMONIT demonstration platform can provide comprehensive, three-dimensional visualisation of subsurface regions, enabling it to map unknown subsurface structures, and to detect and localise hazards such as voids, collapsed culverts and pooled water. The idea of this project, is to take the current INFRAMONIT demonstration platform and use the lessons learnt to create a pre-production prototype based on a road-railer. Any resulting project will involve Network Rail, the owner of railway infrastructure assets and an experienced railway organisation that has the potential to become a customer. Network Rail involvement is secure and have already offered a real world test location, such as Tuxford. The aim of this project is to demonstrate how proven technologies from the INFRAMONIT project can be integrated into a railway environment for the first time and used to provide a First of a Kind demonstrator. INFRAMONIT has already shown that the innovation is at a high TRL and has the potential to deliver subsurface inspections in a real world environment. Our solution will be field-tested and ready for use with an end customer by completion of the project, creating a highly interactive and innovative demonstrator on railway infrastructure and in an environment close to the railway. The project is extremely relevant Theme 1: infrastructure resilience.

Industrial research of disruptive technologies to monitor the health of rail subsurface infrastructure (hidden) assets in real time using innovative radar and visualisation technologies -- Infrastructure Monitoring System (INFRAMONIT). This project simply addresses the global challenge of how to maintain subsurface infrastructure. It focuses on Intelligent Maintenance based on trainborne inspection which provides accurate, timely information for condition-based intervention and reduces the need for workers to be on or about the operating railway. INFRAMONIT can see below the surface to inspect rail substructure, rail ballast, drainage systems, subgrade, water pipes and utilities, tunnel linings, retaining walls and bridge surface structures. Rail infrastructure must meet the future needs of passenger and freight customers and should be more reliable, more readily available and easier to maintain. INFRAMONIT provides the innovations that monitor the health of the infrastructure assets in real time using smart, built-in sensors and novel radar technology. The planned research is a critical investigation for the purpose of product development leading to an improvement in the current state-of-the-art. It will create a prototype demonstrator which will be tested in a laboratory with simulated infrastructure failures for technology validation. It targets a better way of monitoring and visualising the status of infrastructure to avoid disrupting train services by developing a technology that automatically delivers preventive maintenance plans so that maintenance can be completed before a failure occurs. This project will provide a new smart technology to inspect and maintain resilient integrated rail infrastructure. The system is innovative, unique and the transport infrastructure managers involved from Network Rail are confident it has a large market potential. The SMEs will use the project to commence the commercial development of this disruptive technology of infrastructure inspection radar. There are two main foci of innovation, the first is the novel rotational kinematics of the antennae, which allows data to be collected continuously from a three-hundred sixty-degree swath about the longitudinal axis of the vehicle. This offers a significant competitive advantage over current state of the art systems, which consists of several vertically fixed antennae uniformly positioned along the vehicle's lateral axis. The second focus is on fundamental processing software to transform the raw radar data into subsurface visualisations, which will be developed in parallel with the prototype. Key words: radar, inspection, visualisation, preventative maintenance, rail infrastructure, resilience, capacity, failure, repair, planned maintenance.