Fault Diagnosis for Compensating Capacitors of Jointless Track Circuit Based on Dynamic Time Warping

Aiming at the problem of online fault diagnosis for compensating capacitors of jointless track circuit, a dynamic time warping (DTW) based diagnosis method is proposed in this paper. Different from the existing related works, this method only uses the ground indoor monitoring signals of track circuit to locate the faulty compensating capacitor, not depending on the shunt current of inspection train, which is an indispensable condition for existing methods. So, it can be used for online diagnosis of compensating capacitor, which has not yet been realized by existing methods. To overcome the key problem that track circuit cannot obtain the precise position of the train, the DTW method is used for the first time in this situation to recover the function relationship between receiver’s peak voltage and shunt position. The necessity, thinking, and procedure of the method are described in detail. Besides the classical DTW based method, two improved methods for improving classification quality and reducing computation complexity are proposed. Finally, the diagnosis experiments based on the simulation model of track circuit show the effectiveness of the proposed methods.