Railway Inspection using Non-Contact Non-Destructive Techniques

Eman Abdelhameed, Hany Sobhy, Haitham Zohny, Mohamed Elhabiby

Railway, Inspection, laser scanning, point cloud.

Rail inspection is a critical task in railway maintenance operations that is, periodically, carried out to prevent hazards that can have significant legal and financial consequences on railway organizations and to avoid accidents and provide safety for both operators and passengers. Inspections are usually conducted manually by trained operators walking along the railway track, searching for visual anomalies, or by using traditional surveying techniques such as measurements tapes and total stations. These traditional methods of inspection are time-consuming, with regard to work hours and the efforts of both engineers and technicians; inherently inaccurate (due to the potential for human error); and, thus, inefficient. By applying digital techniques and using non-contact systems, such as terrestrial laser scanning (TLS), these negative aspects can be nullified. Terrestrial laser scanners can provide complete digitization for the environment surrounding the railways’ right of way and tracks. Moreover, they are widely applied in rail track surveys, clearance measurements, infrastructure reconstruction, and tunnel mapping, etc.

This research paper proposes a complete solution for railway non-contact inspection using high definition (HD) phase shift (PS) static TLS. The proposed solution can result in the rapid acquisition of immersive data and data analytics for inspection. The solution will help in monitoring the tracks and their supporting mechanisms, relying on in-depth data analysis from two scans at different epochs to detect the rate of change during the time period. The solution will always use the first collected data before starting construction works in the track environment as the base for the comparison to the rate of change.

https://dx.doi.org/10.31873/IJEAS.7.08.13