Railway Vibration isolation system for a railway track monitoring video surveillance complex.

Task

The video surveillance system is installed on railway locomotives and is intended for analyzing the safety of the railway track regarding the presence or emergence of foreign objects on it. The customer needed to improve the quality of the images captured by the cameras, as well as ensure the integrity of the cameras during coupling/uncoupling from the train. The main sources of interference were vibrations from the locomotive’s power unit and repeated shocks when passing over rail joints. Initially, the customer used a custom-designed vibration isolation system based on springs and furniture dampers. The mass of this system was about 40 kg (with the total camera weight of 8 kg). The existing system was ineffective because the captured images still required noise reduction, which was handled by the customer’s programmers developing specialized software.

Solution

We designed a vibration isolation system based on four cable vibration isolators that fully meet the customer’s requirements. This system has variable stiffness in three mutually perpendicular directions. This allowed us to set the system’s natural frequency for effective camera vibration isolation, maintain stable camera orientation, and prevent damage. Additionally, the weight of our system is only 4 kg.

Result

Test footage showed that the camera images do not require additional software processing and can be used directly by the video analytics system. The weight of the system was reduced nearly tenfold, greatly simplifying installation (now one person is needed instead of two). The product is now being mass-produced, and the customer is satisfied.