High-speed Rail Inspection by a Non-contact Passive Ultrasonic Technique

Internal defects in rails are a major cause of derailments and train accidents around the world. Existing techniques for inspecting internal flaws in rails operate at speeds of up to 30 mph which is considerably slower than revenue speeds (~ 60 mph). Lower inspection speeds result in disruptions to normal traffic which is undesirable. This study presents a high-speed rail inspection technique that has the potential of detecting internal rail flaws at regular revenue speeds and could complement traditional rail inspections. The technology uses a non-contact, passive ultrasonic sensing technique that utilizes air-coupled transducers that pick up the ultrasonic guided waves generated by the wheels of the locomotive into the rail and hence does not require a controlled source of excitation. The acoustic transfer function of the rail between two points is extracted through a normalized cross-correlation operator with additional processing to remove uncorrelated noise. The features from this transfer function are statistically analyzed to determine if a rail segment has existing damage. A prototype with multiple pairs of air-coupled capacitive sensors and a data-acquisition system programmed in LabView Real-time was developed to perform non-contact, high-speed rail inspection in real-time. From field tests conducted at the Transportation Technology Center (TTC) in Pueblo, CO, the performance of the system was evaluated using Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curves for a range of different operational parameters such as speed, signal-to-noise ratio, baseline distribution and redundancy from multiple runs.

• Record URL:
  https://annualmeeting.mytrb.org/OnlineProgram/Details/15478
• Supplemental Notes:
  • This paper was sponsored by TRB committee AR060 Standing Committee on Rail Transit Infrastructure Design and Maintenance.
• Corporate Authors:

  Transportation Research Board

  ,    
• Authors:
  • Datta, Diptojit
  • Cui, Ranting
  • di Scalea, Francesco Lanza
  • Wilson, Robert
• Conference:
  • Transportation Research Board 100th Annual Meeting
  • Location: Washington DC, United States
  • Date: 2021-1-5 to 2021-1-29
• Date: 2021

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: Web
• Features: Figures; References; Tables;
• Pagination: 15p

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: High speed rail; Inspection; Sensors; Testing; Transducers; Ultrasonic detectors; Ultrasonics
• Geographic Terms: Pueblo (Colorado)
• Subject Areas: Maintenance and Preservation; Railroads;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01763553
• Record Type: Publication
• Report/Paper Numbers: TRBAM-21-01881
• Files: TRIS, TRB, ATRI
• Created Date: Feb 4 2021 10:54AM