NONLINEAR GUIDED WAVES IN CONTINUOUSLY WELDED RAILS FOR BUCKLING PREDICTION.

Most modern railways use Continuous Welded Rail (CWR). A major problem is the almost total absence of expansion joints that can create severe issues such as buckling in hot weather and breakage in cold weather. A related critical parameter is the rail Neutral Temperature (NT), or the temperature at which the net longitudinal force in the rail is zero. In June 2008 the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), under the sponsorship of a Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) Office of Research and Development (R&D) grant, began work to develop a technique for in-situ measurement of NT and detection of incipient buckling in CWR. The method under investigation is based on ultrasonic guided waves, and the ultimate goal is to build and test a prototype that can be used in motion. A large-scale full rail track (70 feet in length) has been constructed at UCSD's Powell Structural Laboratories, the largest laboratories in the country for structural testing, to validate the NT measurement and buckling detection technique under rail heating conditions well controlled in the laboratory. This paper reports on the status of this project, including proof-of-principle results of stress measurement and buckling detection on a steel I-beam, and initial test results from the large-scale rail testbed at the Powell Labs. These results pave the road for the future development of the rail NT/buckling detection prototype. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]