DapcoNDT has developed a state-of-the-art High Speed Ultrasonic Rail Flaw Detection Systems that can be installed onboard any rail bound vehicle for testing speeds up-to 60 km/h.
The testing carriage has been specifically designed to support and control the ultrasonic probe wheels for field-testing of railroad tracks. Fundamentally the carriage provides the mechanical motions required to position the wheel probes for making ultrasound measurements. The carriage design allows for auto alignment (centering) of the wheel probes on the rail web via a servo drive with feedback control. The wheel probe position is adjusted automatically via servo actuator with feedback control.
The RB-500 ultrasonically inspects both rails simultaneously and is capable of accurately locating defects by GPS coordinates and mileage reported to the thousands of a mile. The RB-500 ultrasonic rail test system is designed to run through frogs and switches. The test carriage is lower t over the rail from the operator control console located inside the rail bound vehicle. The test carriage is equipped with water, electric and pneumatic controls for coupling, gauge, cant, lateral and up and down functions to control placement of ultrasonic wheel probes on the rail.
The RB-500 utilizes the Dapco Digital RTS-500 Ultrasonic Rail Inspection System which has a distributed processing architecture utilizing twenty-four (24) channels of ultrasonic information. The twelve transducers are housed in two wheel probes and are mounted on retractable carriage for gage following. The wheel probes are engaged to the top of the rail and fine mist of water is used to couple the ultrasound into the steel as the vehicle travels at speeds of up to 60 km/h. The ultrasonic data is used to generate a consolidated B-Scan (side profile of the actual rail) video image; syntactic pattern recognition software is then used for defect identification and classification. The pulse density is distance based and is controlled via an encoder. The software runs on Windows real time platform and all of the data is stored on two separate hard drives. All recognition and classification is done in real time and monitored by the test vehicle operator on two flat panel LCD screens. All test data is tagged by accurate encoder system and further referenced to the onboard GPS system.
Standard & Optional Features
- Proprietary wheel probe designs
- Enhanced side looking transducers for VSH (vertical split head) detection.
- Fully integrated Windows operating system with redundant data collection and storage.
- GPS tagging of car movement and defect location.
- New patented enhanced pattern recognition and defect classification.
- Adaptive Learning and feature extraction tools
- Dual mode of independent inspection for decision making and defect detection.
- Forced Operator Acknowledgement of all anomalies
- XL9 Wheel Probe
