Wheel and rail damage and detection : a review

There are many factors that affect rail/wheel life due to wheel-rail interface causing wheel-rail defects such as rail corrugation, squats, rolling contact fatigue, scaled wheel, crack initiation and growth. This paper is first to review the effect of the wear and fatigue mechanisms in the wheel and rail contact. Various detection methods for rail and wheel defects have been developed. Capturing the damage features is a vital part of any condition monitoring approaches for the inspection of railway wheel defects. There are different types of sensing techniques to be adopted and data can be collected under in-service conditions or during the maintenance in the workshop. This paper summarizes sensing techniques used for detecting wheel and rail damage. The advantages and disadvantages of each method are also presented. Based on these methods, an effective way to detect wheel and rail damage is proposed.