Abstract
Railway wheels in service are regularly checked by ultrasonic testing, acoustic emission and eddy current testing method and so on. However, ultrasonic testing is sometimes inadequate for sensitively detecting the cracks in railway wheel which is mainly because of the fact of crack closure. Recently, many researchers have actively fried to improve precision for defect detection of railway wheel. The development of a nondestructive measurement tool for wheel defects and its use for the maintenance of railway wheels would be useful to prevent wheel failure. The induced current focusing potential drop(ICFPD) technique is a new non-destructive tasting technique that can detect defects in railway wheels by applying on electro-magnetic field and potential drops variation. In the present paper, the ICFPD technique is applied to the detection of surface and internal defects for railway wheels. To defect the defects for railway wheels, the sensor for ICFPD is optimized and the tests are carried out with respect to 4 surface defects and 6 internal defects each other. The results show that the surface crack depth of 0.5 mm and internal crack depth of 0.7 mm in wheel tread could be detected by using this method. The ICFPB method is useful to detect the defect that initiated in the tread of railway wheels
