Development of Novel Rail Non-destructive Inspection Technologies

Abstract

Despite rapidly developing real-time manufacturing process inspection systems and maintenance procedure modeling, their reliability and precision is not sufficient to eliminate the need for non-destructive inspection of rails in-service. The train derailments happened and the speeding up train running under higher dynamic axle load reaffirm the importance and necessity to develop non- destructive evaluation (NDE) technologies. In order to obtain an entire inspection of rails, how to keep reasonable sensitivity and resolution at a high speed without missing inspection and avoid false reading are the critical techniques must be considered. This article firstly describes the basic problems in traditional ultrasonic testing and basic results false flaw reading through experiments. Then mainly emphasizes on providing a comprehensive review on the current state-of-the-art in NDE methodologies of rail inspection in order to solve and complement conventional ultrasonic inspection. The corresponding theories, analysis solutions and approaches of signal processing are also mentioned to some extent.

Keywords

• Basic problems
• Novel rail inspection
• Guided waves
• ACFM
• EMATs
• Hybrid system.