Funding:

• • National Science Foundation

  • Department of Transportation/Federal Railroad Administration 

  • Burlington Northern Santa Fe (BNSF) Railway (in-kind)

Collaborators:

• • Transportation Technology Center, Inc.

  • ENSCO, Inc.

Purpose:

To study guided wave propagation in rails and utilize these waves for high-sensitivity rail flaw detection in a non-contact (laser, air-coupled) manner. 

Synopsis:

Safety statistics data from the US Federal Railroad Administration for the ten years 2009-2019 indicate that the three leading causes of train accidents within the category “rail, joint bar and rail anchoring” are: the Detail Fracture (1st leading cause of accidents), the Transverse/Compound Fissure (2nd leading cause of accidents), and the Vertical Split Head (3rd leading cause of accidents). There is a need to improve the detection of these rail flaws for enhanced safety and improved maintenance practices of rail transportation. 

UC San Diego has been developing for the past two decades rail inspection systems that utilize non-contact (laser and air-coupled) ultrasonic probing of the rail, coupled with our best understanding of ultrasonic guided wave propagation in rails, to provide enhanced detection of internal rail head flaws, including under shelling.

Selected Publications:

Ultrasonic Guided Wave Propagation in Rails:

Bartoli, I., Marzani, A., Lanza di Scalea, F., and Viola, E., “Modeling Wave Propagation in Damped Waveguides of Arbitrary Cross-section,” Journal of Sound and Vibration, 295(3-5), pp. 685-707, 2006. 

Bartoli, I., Lanza di Scalea, F., Fateh, M. and Viola, E., “Modeling Guided Wave Propagation with Application to the Long-range Defect Detection in Railroad Tracks,” Nondestructive Testing & Evaluation (NDT & E) International, Vol. 38(5), pp. 325-334, 2005.

Lanza di Scalea, F. and McNamara, J., “Measuring High-frequency Waves Propagating in Railroad Tracks by Joint Time-Frequency Analysis,” Journal of Sound and Vibration, Vol. 273(3), pp. 637-651, 2004.

Lanza di Scalea, F. and McNamara, J., “Wavelet Transform for Characterizing Longitudinal and Lateral Transient Vibrations of Railroad Tracks,” Journal of Research in Nondestructive Evaluation, 15(2), pp. 87-98, 2004. 

Non-contact (laser and air-coupled) Ultrasonic Rail Inspection:

Liang, A., Sternini, S., Capriotti, M., and Francesco Lanza di Scalea, “High Speed Ultrasonic Rail Inspection by Passive Non-contact Technique,” Materials Evaluations, Special Issue on NDT of Railroads, Dr. Anish Poudel, ed., 77(7), pp. 941-950, 2019. 

Xuan, P., Lanza di Scalea, F., Capriotti, M., Liang, A. and Sternini, S.,  “High-speed passive-only rail track integrity evaluation using deep learning-based anomaly detection,” paper no. 10971-25, SPIE Vol. 10971, Nondestructive Characterization and Monitoring of Advanced Materials, Aerospace, Civil Infrastructure, and Transportation XIII, SPIE Smart Structures and Nondestructive Evaluation Symposium, Denver, CO, 3-7 March, 2019 

Lanza di Scalea, F., Zhu, X., Capriotti, M., Liang, A., Mariani, S., and Sternini, S., “Passive Extraction of Dynamic Transfer Function from Arbitrary Ambient Excitations: Application to High-speed Rail Inspection from Wheel-generated Waves,” ASME Journal of Nondestructive Evaluation, Diagnostics and Prognostics of Engineering Systems, Inaugural Issue 1(1), pp. 0110051-01100512, 2018. 

Mariani, S. and Lanza di Scalea, F., “Predictions of Defect Detection Performance of Air-Coupled Ultrasonic Rail Inspection System,” Structural Health Monitoring International Journal, 17(3), pp. 684-705, 2018. 

Mariani, S., Nguyen, T. and Lanza di Scalea, F., “Air-Coupled Ultrasonic Testing of Rails: Experimental Prototype and Finite Element Simulations,” Materials Evaluation, 75(12), pp. 1497-1507, 2017. 

Mariani, S., Nguyen, T., Zhu, X., and Lanza di Scalea, F., “Field Test Performance of Non-contact Ultrasonic Rail Inspection System,” ASCE Journal of Transportation Engineering, Part A: Systems, 143(5), pp. 040170071-0401700714, 2017. 

Mariani, S., Nguyen, T., Phillips, R., Kijanka, P., Lanza di Scalea, F., Staszewski, W., Fateh, M. and Carr, G., “Non-Contact Air-Coupled Ultrasonic Guided Wave Inspection of Rails,” Structural Health Monitoring International Journal, Special Issue on Noncontact Measurement Technologies, 12(5-6), pp. 539-548, 2014.

Mariani, S., Nguyen, T., Lanza di Scalea, F. and Fateh, M., “High speed Non-contact Ultrasonic Guided Wave Inspections of Rails,” CD-ROM Proceedings of the 2014 ASME Joint Rail Conference, Colorado Springs, CO, pp. 1-6, April 2-4, 2014.

Mariani, S., Nguyen, T., Phillips, R., Kijanka, P, Lanza di Scalea, F. and Staszewski, W., “Non-Contact Ultrasonic Guided Wave Inspection Of Rails,” Structural Health Monitoring 2013 – A Roadmap to Intelligent Structures – Proceeding of the 9th Intl Workshop on Structural Health Monitoring, F-K. Chang, ed., Stanford University, pp. 2570-2577, Sept. 10-12, 2013. 

Coccia, S., Phillips, R., Bartoli, I., Salamone, S., Rizzo, P., Lanza di Scalea, F., “On-line High-speed Rail Defect Detection – Part II,” Federal Railroad Administration Technical Report DOT/FRA/ORD-12/02, March 2012 (140 pages).

Coccia, S., Phillips, R., Bartoli, I., Salamone, S., Lanza di Scalea, F., Fateh, M., and Carr, G., “UCSD/FRA Non-contact Ultrasonic Guided Wave System for Rail Inspection: An Update,” Journal of the Transportation Research Board, Transportation Research Record no. 2261, pp. 143-147, 2011.

Coccia, S., Bartoli, I., Marzani, A., Lanza di Scalea, F., Salamone, S. and Fateh, M., “Numerical and Experimental Study of Guided Waves for Detection of Rail Head Defects,” NDT&E International, 44(1), pp. 93-100, 2011.

Rizzo, P., Cammarata, M., Bartoli, I., Lanza di Scalea, F., Salamone, S., Coccia, S. and Phillips, R., “Ultrasonic Guided Wave-based Monitoring of Rail Head: Laboratory and Field Tests,” Advances in Civil Engineering – Special Issue on Structural Health Monitoring for Civil Structures: From the Lab to the Field, vol. 2010, Art. ID 291293, pp. 1-13, 2010.

Coccia, S., Bartoli, I., Salamone, S., Phillips, R., Lanza di Scalea, F., and Fateh, M., “Non-contact Ultrasonic Guided Wave Detection of Rail Defects,” Journal of the Transportation Research Board, Transportation Research Record no. 2117, pp. 77-84, 2009.

Rizzo, P., Coccia, S., Bartoli, I., and Lanza di Scalea, F., “Non-Contact Rail Monitoring by Ultrasonic Guided Waves,” Chapter 145 of Encyclopedia of Structural Health Monitoring, C. Boller, F-K. Chang and Y. Fujino, eds., Johns Wiley & Sons, Chichester, UK, pp. 2397-2410, 2009.

Lanza di Scalea, F. “Ultrasonic Testing Applications in the Railroad Industry,” Chapter 15: Special Applications of Ultrasonic Testing, in Non-destructive Testing Handbook, 3rd edition, P.O. Moore, ed., American Society for Nondestructive Testing, pp. 535-552, 2007.

Lanza di Scalea, F., Rizzo, P., Coccia, S., Bartoli, I. and Fateh, M., “Laser/air-coupled Hybrid Non-contact System for Defect Detection in Rail Tracks: Status of FRA Prototype Development at UC San Diego,” Journal of the Transportation Research Board, Transportation Research Record no. 1943, pp. 57-64, 2006.

Lanza di Scalea, F., Rizzo, P., Coccia, S., Bartoli, I., Fateh, M., Viola, E. and Pascale, G., “Non-contact Ultrasonic Inspection of Rails and Signal Processing for Automatic Defect Detection and Classification,” Insight – Non-destructive Testing and Condition Monitoring, EURO Issue on NDT in the Rail Industry, Vol. 47(6), pp. 346-353, 2005.

Lanza di Scalea, F., Bartoli, I., Rizzo, P. and Fateh, M., “High-speed Defect Detection in Rails by Non-contact Guided Ultrasonic Testing,” Journal of the Transportation Research Board, Transportation Research Record no. 1916, pp. 66-77, 2005.

McNamara, J., Lanza di Scalea, F. and Fateh, M. “Automatic Defect Classification in Long-range Ultrasonic Rail Inspection Using a Support Vector Machine-based Smart System,” Insight – Non-destructive Testing and Condition Monitoring, EURO Issue on NDT in the Rail Industry, Vol. 46(6), pp. 331-337, 2004.

McNamara, J. and Lanza di Scalea, F., “Air-coupled Ultrasonic Testing of Railroad Rails,” Materials Evaluation, Vol. 60(12), pp. 1431-1437, 2002.

Lanza di Scalea, F., “Advances in Non-contact Ultrasonic Inspection of Railroad Tracks,” Experimental Techniques, Vol. 24(5), pp. 23-26, 2000.