Application of Vibration Signal Processing Methods to Detect and Diagnose Wheel Flats in Railway Vehicles

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The paper presents two methods to detect wheel flats and diagnose flat sizes. First, the order analysis method was combined with the existing cepstrum analysis method to consider changes in train speed. Second, cross correlation analysis was applied to find the flat signal from the vibration signal containing the severe field noise signal produced by the vibrations of the rail irregularities and bogie components. Finally, the two methods are validated based on experimental data.

The topic of the paper is interesting and current. In the recent years, the issue of detecting and diagnosing defects in railway vehicles has gained interest for researchers. In this context, the authors should highlight what is the real contribution of this work and their impact on the state of the art of the results in the field compared with most recent research. For this, the literature survey should be improved with recent papers connecting with topic, and the introduction should be developed. The introduction is superficial and the literature survey is based only two references from 2013 and 2007 (see references 7 and 8).

Also, other points should be reviewed before publication:

1. The figures should be better discussed.For example, figures 2 - 6. It is not clear what the authors wanted to highlight with these figures.Figures 7, 8, 9 and 10 also follow, in which case the comment is dry: “Fig.7 is a time domain signal extracted from simulation of wheel-rail dynamics at 2 km/h/s acceleration and the speed was increased from 40km/h to 50km/h for 5 seconds. And as shown in Fig. 8 and Fig. 9, time domain was changed into the rotation angle domain of the wheel axis, and the angular intervals were equalized using interpolation of signal data points. After that, the cepstrum was applied, and the flat signal detection was obtained as shown Fig. 10.”

And so on, figures 11, 12 ...

2. The quality of the figures should be improved.

3. The description of the experimental tests should be detailed.

4. The conclusions should be more concise, highlight the contributions of the paper. Based on the results obtained some generic and fundamental conclusions need to be drawn.

5. The text and English language in the paper have to checked, edited and corrected.

Author Response

Thank you for your valuable review.

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

-English should be corrected
-please add colorful picture of measurements (optionally);;; + arrows what is what
-please add block diagram of the proposed research step by step ;;; what is the result of paper?;;;
-please add block diagram of the proposed method;;;;
-please add photo/photos of application of the proposed research ;;;; 
-please add sentences about future analysis;;;
-Figures should have better quality;;;; for now they are low
-Fonts of figures should be bigger;;;
-Please add labels to axes (Figures);;;;
-please add arrows to photos what is what;;;
-formulas and fonts should be formatted;;;;
-references should be 2018-2021 Web of Science about 50% or more ;; 30 at least
-Please compare with other methods, justify. Advantages or Disadvantages different methods
for example:

1) Fault diagnosis of electric impact drills using thermal imaging, Measurement, Volume 171, 2021, 
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.measurement.2020.108815

-Conclusion: point out what are you done;;;;
-is there possibility to use the proposed method for other problems?

Author Response

Thank you for your valuable review.

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

The authors have answered all issues. The additions are sufficient and the manuscript has been improved. Therefore, the reviewer thinks this paper includes beneficial information for the researchers in this area and worth to be published in Applied Sciences.

Author Response

Dear reviewer,

Thank you for kind review opinion.

Reviewer 2 Report

Line 170 remove "and". We dont start sentence with "and"

Author Response

Point 1: Line 170 remove "and". We dont start sentence with "and"

Response 1 : The sentence has been improved as ' As shown in~'

 

Thank you very much for kind review opinion.