This article describes a new system for high-speed and noncontact rail integrity evaluation being developed at the University of California at San Diego. A prototype using an ultrasonic air-coupled guided wave signal generation and aircoupled signal detection has been tested at the University of California at San Diego Rail Defect Farm. In addition to a real-time statistical analysis algorithm, the prototype uses a specialized filtering approach due to the inherently poor signal-to-noise ratio of the air-coupled ultrasonic measurements in rail steel. The laboratory results indicate that the prototype is able to detect internal rail defects with a high reliability. Extensions of the system are planned to add rail surface characterization to the internal rail defect detection. In addition to the description of the prototype and test results, numerical analyses of ultrasonic guided wave propagation in rails have been performed using a Local Interaction Simulation Approach algorithm and some of these results are shown. The numerical analysis has helped designing various aspects of the prototype for maximizing its sensitivity to defects.

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The University of California at San Diego (UCSD), under a Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) Office of Research and Development (R&D) grant, is developing a system for high-speed and non-contact rail defect detection. A prototype using an ultrasonic air-coupled guided wave signal generation and air-coupled signal detection, paired with a real-time statistical analysis algorithm, has been realized. This system requires a specialized filtering approach based on electrical impedance matching due to the inherently poor signal-to-noise ratio of air-coupled ultrasonic measurements in rail steel. Various aspects of the prototype have been designed with the aid of numerical analyses. In particular, simulations of ultrasonic guided wave propagation in rails have been performed using a Local Interaction Simulation Approach (LISA) algorithm. The system's operating parameters were selected based on Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curves, which provide a quantitative manner to evaluate different detection performances based on the trade-off between detection rate and false positive rate. Results from the first field test of the non-contact air-coupled defect detection prototype conducted at the Transportation Technology Center (TTC) in Pueblo, Colorado, in October 2014 are presented and discussed in this paper. The results indicate that the prototype is able to detect internal cracks with high reliability.

The University of California at San Diego (UCSD), under a Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) Office of Research and Development (R&D) grant, is developing a system for high-speed and non-contact rail defect detection. A prototype using an ultrasonic air-coupled guided wave signal generation and air-coupled signal detection, paired with a real-time statistical analysis algorithm, has been realized. This system requires a specialized filtering approach based on electrical impedance matching due to the inherently poor signal-to-noise ratio of air-coupled ultrasonic measurements in rail steel. Various aspects of the prototype have been designed with the aid of numerical analyses. In particular, simulations of ultrasonic guided wave propagation in rails have been performed using a Local Interaction Simulation Approach (LISA) algorithm. The system’s operating parameters were selected based on Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curves, which provide a quantitative manner to evaluate different detection performances based on the trade-off between detection rate and false positive rate. The prototype based on this technology was tested in October 2014 at the Transportation Technology Center (TTC) in Pueblo, Colorado, and again in November 2015 after incorporating changes based on lessons learned.

This paper discusses some improvements to ultrasonic synthetic imaging in solids with primary applications to nondestructive testing of materials and structures. Specifically, the study proposes new adaptive weights applied to the beamforming array that are based on the physics of the propagating waves, specifically the displacement structure of the propagating longitudinal (L) mode and shear (S) mode that are naturally coexisting in a solid. The wave mode structures can be combined with the wave geometrical spreading to better filter the array (in a matched filter approach) and improve its focusing ability compared to static array weights. This paper also proposes compounding, or summing, images obtained from the different wave modes to further improve the array gain without increasing its physical aperture. The wave mode compounding can be performed either incoherently or coherently, in analogy with compounding multiple frequencies or multiple excitations. Numerical simulations and experimental testing demonstrate the potential improvements obtainable by the wave structure adaptive weights compared to either static weights in conventional delay-and-sum focusing, or adaptive weights based on geometrical spreading alone in minimum-variance distortionless response focusing.