Tuesday, March 18, 2014

Techniques Used In Rail Inspection

By Gwen Lowe


One of the main causes of railway accidents is usually linked to railway catastrophic failures. Based on some researches carried out to assess the information pertaining to railway safety, many of these failures are caused by poor railway maintenance. To minimize these failures and make it easy for people to keep railways at the best conditions, people have discovered various rail inspection methods.

One of these methods is the use high-tech ultrasound equipment. These apparatus are made to operate through generating short ultrasound pulse waves with frequencies of less than fifteen MHz towards the metals being examined that are also reflected back to such devices as an interface of such faults. The devices mostly show the results in the type of amplitude signals that represent both wave distance and intensity.

One other common technique is the distribution of eddy current on the rails. Normally, these ways are self-induced and creates magnetic field on such metals. Naturally, the stronger the magnetic field, the stronger the electrical conductivity in the metals being examined. When inspecting rails, the specialist would have to compare the initial electrical conductivity of such metals and the recent one to determine if such metals have faults.

Radiography technology also plays a great role when inspecting rails for faults. This works in such a way that electromagnetic waves like x-rays would be transmitted into the interior of certain rails at very high frequencies. The waves would then come out in image form of the interior structure of such materials where a high-tech devices would be used to read the image details to determine whether there are faults.

The use of magnetic particle inspection is also common. This practice is majored at detecting subsurface and surface discontinuities in ferromagnetic materials like cobalt, nickel and iron. It works by inducing a magnetic flux to the surface of metals. If the metal has some faults, the magnetic flux would leak since air cannot hold the same magnetic field per volume like metals.

Railway inspection cars are installed with the suitable technologies and devices used to check rails for flaws. These cars come with probes and transducers, which are mainly designed, to aid in detecting mileage and other problems associated with railway sight. Many of these cars are designed to move at speeds higher than forty-eight kilometers an hour.

Another essential technique that plays a great role when examining faults in rails is the use of electromagnetic acoustic transducers. Transducers use electromagnetic systems to instantly generate certain waves when placed over certain metals. These waves are used to determine the presence of problems on such materials that guarantees the right measures could be taken.

Whenever traveling by trains, people always have the desire of arriving safe. However, in frequent cases some train travelers do not reach their destinations safely and comfortably with some of the causes being faults within the rail tracks. To be able to reduce such failures, there are various methods that have been developed to enable people have easier time whenever examining rails for flaws.




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