• The Journal of Korea Robotics Society
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• v.17 no.2
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• pp.216-220
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• 2022

This paper proposes an inspection robot that can operate on a single square rail. Various inspection robots have been developed to identify emergency situations in industrial environments, such as those involving fires or individuals with cardiac arrest. Because the robots must operate in wide areas and long tunnels, they are designed to move along a rail installed on the ceiling. Double rail track are typically used to ensure the stability of robot movement. However, the cost for installing a double rail track is nearly two times that for a single rail track. Moreover, it is challenging to install double rail tracks while ensuring the same curvature and interval between the two rails. Therefore, in this study, an inspection robot that operate on a single square rail track is developed. To ensure stable movement in the longitudinal and lateral directions, two passive guide parts are used, and the main active wheel is allowed to move on the upper side of the square rail. The prototype was manufactured, and experiments were performed for different robot velocities.

• Proceedings of the KSR Conference
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• 2011.05a
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• pp.154-161
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• 2011

Rail inspection is very important as damages in rail can bring about a serious railway accident. In this paper, several real-time non-destructive technologies applied or considered to be applied to damage detection of rails are described. Some limits of existing ultrasonic testing method which has been widely used for rail inspection are discussed. Non-contact type NDE methods for rail inspection and their technical problems are also described.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Nondestructive Testing
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• v.31 no.4
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• pp.398-413
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• 2011

For railway safety, it is very important to detect damages of rails at their early stage because any undetected damage in a rail can break the rail and cause a serious railway accident. In this paper, several NDT applicable to rail inspections are described. Major damage types in rails are discussed first and the rail inspection technology using conventional piezoelectric ultrasonic transducers, which is widely adopted for damage detection of rails, is explained. Other NDT being researched or tested for rail inspection are also discussed as complementary technologies to the concurrent contact type ultrasonic inspection. Characteristics of each rail inspection technologies are evaluated in order to provide requirements for future development of a new rail inspection method.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Nondestructive Testing
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• v.32 no.6
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• pp.696-702
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• 2012

In this study, a noncontact laser ultrasonic system is proposed for rail defect detection. An Nd-Yag pulse laser is used for generation of ultrasonic waves, and the corresponding ultrasonic responses are measured by a laser Doppler vibrometer. For the detection of rail surface damages, the shape of the excitation laser beam is transformed into a line. On the other hand, a point source laser beam is used for the inspection of defects inside a rail head. Then, the interactions of propagating ultrasonic waves with defects are examined using actual rail specimens. Amplitude attenuation was mainly observed for a surface crack, and reflections were most noticeable from an internal damage. Finally, opportunities and challenges associated with real-time rail inspection from a high-speed train are discussed.

• Proceedings of the KSR Conference
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• 2007.11a
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• pp.278-282
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• 2007

The riding comfort and the durability of train are effected by the rail irregularities such as track gauge, superelevation, alignment, longitudinal level, twist, cant and cross level. Inspection and estimation of irregularities are very important to maintain the rail condition. Generally, the EM120 has been utilized to measure the rail irregularities once a month in Korea. However, the EM120 can be operated at night time only, because the inspection speed of EM120 is much slower than the speed of high-speed trains. Also, the EM120 is too slow to inspect effectively for the whole commercial line. Therefore, we have mounted the track inspection system on the High-Speed Rolling Stock 350 eXperimental (HSR350X) and measured the rail irregularities to confirm the condition of a rail while running 300km/h. In this paper, the track inspection system mounted on HSR350X is mainly considered, and the measured results through test run are introduced.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society for Noise and Vibration Engineering Conference
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• 2012.10a
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• pp.617-625
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• 2012

Non-contact detection of internal defects in a rail using ultrasonic waves is discussed in this paper. Cracks in a rail may be a cause of a serious railway accident such as derailment if left undetected. Concurrent rail inspection method based on ultrasonic testing using piezoelectric transducers has several limitations as it should keep physical contact with the rail. This work suggests a non-contact detection of internal defects in a rail using ElectroMagnetic Acoustic Transducers (EMAT) which can produce and measure ultrasonic waves in a rail without any couplant. The EMATs for rail inspection are designed and fabricated and their working performance is verified through a series of experiments on various types of internal defects in test rails. The effect of lift-off between the transducers and the rail on the generated signals is also discussed.

• Proceedings of the KSR Conference
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• 2011.05a
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• pp.1378-1387
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• 2011

Seoul Metropolitan Rapid Transit Corporation - which is operating the subway lines No. 5, 6, 7 and 8 of Seoul's subway - has been operating a variety of motor cars and rail inspection vehicles to transport workers and materials into the tunnel at night after the daily revenue service for the maintenance of tunnel structure and track. However, the air quality in tunnels has been contaminated due to the operation of diesel engine cars, and rail inspection vehicles are now having higher chances of risks since the lightweight vehicles made with aluminum bogie became too obsolete. In this study, MRT type eco-friendly electric multi-inspection car has been elaborated for the purpose of improvement of tunnel environment and replacement of motor cars and rail inspection vehicles.

• Proceedings of the KSR Conference
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• 2011.05a
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• pp.427-434
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• 2011

This paper is focused on application of recursive least squares method to estimate rail irregularities from the acceleration measurement on an axle-box or a bogie for the rail condition monitoring with in-service high-speed trains. Generally, the rail condition was monitored by a special railway inspection vehicle but the monitoring method needs an expensive measurement system. A monitoring method using accelerometers on an axle-box or a bogie was already proposed in the previous study, and the displacement was successfully estimated from the acceleration data by using Kalman and frequency selective band-pass filters. However, it was found that the displacement included not only the rail irregularities but also phase delay of the applied filters, and effect of suspension of the bogie and conicity of the wheel. To identify the rail irregularities from the estimated displacement, a compensation filter method is proposed. The compensation filters are derived by using recursive least squares method with the estimated displacement as input and the measured rail irregularity as output. The estimated rail irregularities are compared with the true rail irregularity data from the rail inspection system. From the comparison, the proposed method is a useful tool for the measurement of lateral and vertical rail irregularity.

• Transactions of the Korean Society for Noise and Vibration Engineering
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• v.22 no.10
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• pp.1010-1019
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• 2012

Non-contact detection of internal defects in a rail using ultrasonic waves is discussed in this paper. Cracks in a rail may be the cause of a serious railway accident such as derailment if left undetected. Concurrent rail inspection method based on ultrasonic testing using piezoelectric transducers has several limitations as it should keep physical contact with the rail. This work suggests a non-contact detection of internal defects in a rail using ElectroMagnetic Acoustic Transducers (EMAT) which can produce and measure ultrasonic waves in a rail without any couplant. The EMATs for rail inspection are designed and fabricated and their working performance is verified through a series of experiments on various types of internal defects in test rails. The effect of lift-off between the transducers and the rail on the generated signals is also discussed.

• The Transactions of The Korean Institute of Electrical Engineers
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• v.66 no.5
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• pp.870-876
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• 2017

In this paper, we proposed the automatic vision inspection system using multi-layer perceptron to detect the defects occurred on rail surface. The proposed system consists of image acquisition part and analysis part. Rail surface image is acquired as equal interval using line scan camera and lighting. Mean filter and dynamic threshold is used to reduce noise and segment defect area. Various features to characterize the defects are extracted. And they are used to train and distinguish defects by MLP-classifier. The system is installed on HEMU-430X and applied to analyze the rail surface images acquired from Honam-line at high speed up to 300 km/h. Recognition rate is calculated through comparison with manual inspection results.