ACFM

Rail Applications

The rail industry has many inspection areas for which ACFM has been used. These cover all aspects of the industry including rolling-stock components (such as axles and bogies), bridges and rails.

On axles ACFM has been proved beneficial for detecting external cracking on solid axles where ultrasonics are less sensitive. Following trials in which ACFM proved more reliable than MPI, ACFM was approved and accredited for use on axles and wheelsets. Special probes have also been developed to deploy the technique on parts of an axle while still fitted to the train.

A requirement to inspect bogies without removing paint led to development of a special ACFM system for Bombardier Transportation UK. This development includes semi-automated detection and sizing, improved reporting and collation of results, as well as several other improvements to the standard equipment.

ACFM is also used for detecting and sizing surface-breaking cracking (particularly gauge-corner cracking or head checking) on rails. This type of cracking is often difficult to quantify with ultrasonic probes because the cracks occur in clusters and shallow cracks can mask deeper cracks behind. It is important to know the depth of the deepest crack in a cluster because this determines whether or not the rail can be repaired by grinding.

For rail inspection a specially shaped array probe is deployed along the rail using a Walking Stick.

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