An investigation on rail health monitoring using acoustic emission technique by tensile test

Abstract

In order to detect the health status of high-speed railway, various studies have been examined by Acoustic Emission (AE) method. However, little work has been done on studying the relationship between rail status and features of AE signals, and this relationship can be used to establish a detection criterion for rail health monitoring. This paper presents a methodology on rail health monitoring by AE signals and establishing a detection criterion. AE signals in different safe status are obtained by tensile testing machine and AE data acquisition system. The safe and unsafe region of rail steel is analyzed by stress-strain curve. Based on the Chebyshev's inequality and the variation rate of AE hits, a detection criteria is established to detect the safe status of rail, and the corresponding detection procedure are provided. The results clearly illustrate that the proposed method can detect the safe status of rail effectively.