Meeting Title Tenth International Wheelset Congress. This work discusses three possible acoustic measurement techniques to detect and quantify the stress railroad wheel rims. The goal is to develop instrumentation useful for nondestructive testing during field inspection for potentially dangerous conditions.
Elastic changes caused by stress generate very small, but detectable velocity changes.
However, other factors, notably changes in metallurgical texture, will similarly alter the velocity. Initial tests indicate the possibility of determining the size of the texture effect and reducing the uncertainty in measured stress to about 55 MPa or less. Ultrasonic data collected with this gear correlate well those from destructive sawcutting for the four wheels we have examined so far.