NDE system for railway wheel inspection in a standard FPGA

A special NDE system built into a low-cost FPGA has been developed for detecting railway wheelflats. The system operates with the train moving at low-speed over a measuring rail. Ultrasonic surface wave pulses are sent at regular intervals and echoes are acquired and processed by the system. The variations in the round trip time-of-flight (RTOF) of the ultrasonic pulse allow to detect and quantify the flats size.The logic design optimizes the storage capabilities by keeping only the rail–wheel contact echo and its environment. For this purpose, a wheel tracking algorithm has been implemented. It allows reducing the data volume by controlling the delay time from pulse emission to the acquisition window following the running wheel. Furthermore, since signals are masked by the rail structural noise, they are processed before executing the tracking algorithm. This work presents the architecture and performance of the developed system with experimental data.