Inspection of transverse flaws for railways using phased array ultrasonic technique

Abstract

Rail monitoring is an important activity which aims to preserve the safety and availability of railways. According to statistics, the primary cause of railway accidents is due to transverse defects that occur in the rail head. These special defects develop generally in a plane orthogonal to the rail running direction. The detection of these defects is a priority to increase the safety of rail transportation. Rail control monitoring techniques mostly rely on infrared thermography, eddy currents, air-coupled acoustic sensors, and ultrasounds. The present research studies the rail diagnosis by means of a non-contact device. The focus is on ultrasonic based methods where excitation is generated by thermal elastic coupling following laser irradiation of the rail head. For the reception of echoes, a special ultrasound sensor was used. In order to sense defects, phased array elements, which use multiple transducers and electronic time delays, are used to increase and to focalise the signal intensity. Flaws that have a moderate extension are better detected by the proposed method than with laser irradiation consisting of a single spot.