TY - CONF A1 - Heckel, Thomas A1 - Boehm, Rainer A1 - Mook, G. T1 - Ultrasonic rail inspection with array probes T2 - Railway Engineering 2019 N2 - For more than 60 years ultrasonic rail inspection is used as non-destructive testing method to ensure the safe operation of rail tracks. Constantly increasing traffic density and heavy loads have been the motor for the development of new test equipment from handheld devices to rail inspection trains. (Krull 2003)Up to the present most of the system solutions feature conventional ultrasonic transducers housed in wheel-type and slide-type probes. Different tasks have to be carried out during an in-service inspection for flaws in the rail head, rail web and rail foot as well as rolling contact fatigue (Heckel 2018). The more tasks the inspection system has to perform, the more probes are needed. Compared against standard ultrasonic testing methods the application of array probes offers advantages and flexibility by the electronic steering possibilities to control the transmitted and received sound fields. This allows to increase functionality by software while decreasing the number of probes needed in hardware in parallel. One drawback in application of phased array probes is that the repetition frequency of the subsequent measurements will be reduced by the number of virtual probe functions each phased array probe has to perform. This may limit the range of use for phased array probes in high speed applications. To overcome these limits special designs for array probes and signal processing are necessary. T2 - Railway Engineering 2019 CY - Edinburgh, UK DA - 03.07.2019 KW - High speed KW - Ultrasound KW - Rail inspection KW - Phased array probes PY - 2019 VL - 2019 SP - 1 EP - 3 AN - OPUS4-49680 LA - eng AD - Bundesanstalt fuer Materialforschung und -pruefung (BAM), Berlin, Germany ER -