Regular inspections of railway axles are necessary, with a requirement for minimal axle disassembly together with reliable interpretation. This paper presents the development of an ultrasonic system for inspection of solid railway axles from their end face. The developed system has been used to inspect sample train axle sections containing Electro Discharge Machined (EDM) notches of 1 and 3 mm depth, and the results from ongoing testing are presented and discussed. The system utilises a data acquisition technique called Full Matrix Capture (FMC), which has been shown to have good potential to meet industrial needs. Raw data is initially processed using the Sequential Phased Array (SPA) reconstruction algorithm. Inspection time is reduced through the development of a technique called Limited Transmission Aperture (LTA), which reduces the number of transmissions made during the inspection. This approach reduces both the data acquisition and post processing times, but at the cost of image quality. A comparison between time for inspection and image quality forms the basis of this paper. Results show that using the LTA algorithm, 9 transmission elements can be used to achieve an acceptable image quality, at a frame rate of 0.75 frames per second.
Improved frame rate for rail axle inspection using a limited transmission aperture
Verbesserte Bildfrequenz für die Eisenbahnachsenprüfung mittels begrenzter Transmissionsapertur
2010
10 Seiten, 9 Bilder, 1 Tabelle, 6 Quellen
(nicht paginiert)
Conference paper
Storage medium
English