Section: Bilateral Contracts and Grants with Industry

Bilateral Contracts with Industry

Contract with SNCF: DEMETER

Participants : Vincent Le Cam, Quentin Bossard, Mathieu Le Pen.

IFSTTAR’s engineers Arthur Bouche and Laurent Lemarchand are contributing to this project.

DEMETER is one of the major projects for I4S in terms of strategy, scientific and technological impact.

DEMETER is a meta project whose global objective is the validation of the contribution of the Internet of Things (IOT) applied to the health monitoring of railway items. SNCF and IFSTTAR have signed a roadmap for safety relevant items, where wireless monitoring and smart algorithms could bring strong improvements to SNCF in terms of real-time maintenance or predictive maintenance. Those items are, amongst others:

• Crossing engine motor monitoring

• Needle motor monitoring

• Axel counter monitoring

• Train detection pedal monitoring

In each case, a prototype of a specific wireless and smart sensor is designed (that may or may not use PEGASE 2 platform), installed along railway lines in service and data are transmitted wirelessly to the cloud supervisor at IFSTTAR for evaluation in SHM algorithms.

In particular, during 2017 SNCF and IFSTTAR have performed the following common projects:

• finalization of the TRAIN PEDAL DETECTION instrumentation with smart sensors using new wireless and industrial IOT protocoles: LoRa and Sigfox. A specific pedal is now subject of in situ test led by SNCF

• axel counter monitoring has been the major R&D subject of 2017: 2 entire and specific smart sensors have been designed, programmed and installed at Chevilly specific SNCF testbench (e.g. with real train passages). Specific algorithms (such as PID and Pattern Recognition) have been modeled and programmed into PEGASE2 platform for these new sensors.

For the future, new projects related to

• water-level monitoring around railways has been setup

• ballast vibration monitoring of railways has been setup

• "unshunting of electrical lines at train passage" detection around railways

have been initiated with SNCF R&D department.

Contracts with SDEL-CC (VINCI Group)

Participants : Vincent Le Cam, Mathieu Le Pen.

This work was done in collaboration with Laurent Lemarchand, and Arthur Bouche at IFSTTAR, SII, Nantes.

Following a 2016 contract, a new contract was signed in 2017 until end 2018, with the company SDEL-CC, a $100\%$ affiliate of the VINCI Group, Energy department. The project exploits the unique time stamp capacity of the PEGASE 2 platform up to 50 nanoseconds, independently of distances in the network of PEGASE2 nodes. The synchronization capacity is employed to design a sensor prototype based on PEGASE 2 to time-stamp the current wave after a lightning impact on a high-voltage line. By knowing the exact time, the wave can be seen at each extremity of the electrical line to localize accurately the lightning impact point.

During 2017, a real high-voltage electrical line has been instrumented: at each end of the line, 2 sensors have been set up and data are sent in real time to a cloud platform. Furthermore, the software of the platform was optimized: at the embedded level (i.e. on PEGASE 2 wireless system) with new algorithms to correct time synchronization up to some 10 nanoseconds, at the cloud level with a specific QT C++ Interface to display results (i.e. lightning localization on electrical line) and to transform raw data into ComTrade standard representation.

Discussions are ongoing with SDEL-CC to transform the prototype into a future product.