Ultrasonic dynamic plane wave imaging for high-speed railway inspection

Abstract

The detection of internal defects within railway tracks stands as a critical aspect of ensuring transport security, given its potential to precipitate severe accidents. Phased array ultrasonic testing methods have gained extensive usage in rail inspection owing to their remarkable precision and expansive coverage. Traditional ultrasonic inspection techniques typically require either a fixed relative position between the transducer and the specimens or a gentle movement of the transducer to beamform. However, the unavoidable vibration stemming from the vehicle–rail coupled interactions often results in time-variant media, significantly impacting the beamforming. This paper presents a refined wavenumber-domain plane wave imaging technique tailored to enable real-time dynamic imaging, specifically accommodating the vertical vibrational movement of the transducer. Real-time calculation of the transmission focal law is achieved by numerical fitting. The wavenumber-domain technique is utilized to realize real-time accurately reconstructed images. The efficacy of the proposed method is assessed through simulations and experiments performed on a convex cylindrical specimen and a rail head sample, respectively. It can be seen that this approach can achieve a frame rate of 83.3 fps with a pipeline architecture in this study, demonstrating the capability to reconstruct images in vibrating environments, such as during the high-speed inspection of railways.