Rail inspection is usually carried out ultrasonically using rolling wheel transducers that operate at a maximum speed of ~ 30 mph. This presentation will cover recent progress on the development of an ultrasonic rail inspection method that can be carried out at regular train revenue speed (e.g. 60 mph). This possibility would enable trains to perform rail inspection during normal traffic operations (“smart” trains), and exploiting the unprecedented redundancy that would result from multiple train passes over the same section of rail.The method under development utilizes the train wheels as the “natural” or “ambient” excitation of the rail, and a series of (non-contact) air-coupled ultrasonic receivers to detect the resulting ultrasonic waves. The approach is therefore “output only”. A special signal processing routine is applied to minimize the effect of the uncontrolled wheel excitations and extract, passively, the transfer function of the rail between pairs of the receivers.Results will be shown from a series of field tests at the Transportation Technology Center in Pueblo, Colorado, conducted at speeds up to 80 mph. The defect detection performance of the system under development is determined in terms of Receiver Operating Characteristic curves that trade the probability of detection with the probability of false alarms. The results show some reasonable potential, but also highlight several areas of improvement that are being addressed in current research.

High-Speed Inspection of Rails by Output-Only Ultrasonic Monitoring

Paper Proceedings: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/qnde/QNDE2021/volume/85529

ASME 2021 48th Annual Review of Progress in Quantitative Nondestructive Evaluation (QNDE2021)

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