Sliding Window Dynamic Time-Series Warping-Based Ultrasonic Guided Wave Temperature Compensation and Defect Monitoring Method for Turnout Rail Foot.

Temperature changes are a major challenge in outdoor guided wave structural health monitoring of rails. Temperature variations greatly impact the waveform of guided wave signals, making it challenging to diagnose and characterize defects. Traditional temperature compensation methods, such as signal stretch and scale transform, are restricted to use in regular structures, such as plates and pipes. To solve the temperature compensation problem in long rails with serious mode conversion and complex structure echo, we propose a temperature compensation and defect monitoring method, namely, sliding window dynamic time-series warping (SWDTW), which overcomes the challenges of mass computation and overcompensation of dynamic time-series warping (DTW). The basic idea of SWDTW is to utilize sliding windows to accelerate the computation and identify defects from subsequence scales. Then, an index, window subsequence Teager energy (WSTE), is used to indicate the local abnormality of guided wave signals, and a sliding window net (SWnet) is devised to monitor the occurrence of defects automatically. Outdoor monitoring of turnout rails showed that the proposed method can effectively reduce the temperature noise and recognize an artificial defect with 1.16% and 0.36% cross-sectional change rates (CSCRs) on the switch and stock rails, respectively, at different temperatures; moreover, the defect signals processed by SWDTW showed better defect identification performance than those processed by scale transform and DTW.

High-Sensitivity Ultrasonic Guided Wave Monitoring of Pipe Defects Using Adaptive Principal Component Analysis.

Ultrasonic guided wave monitoring is regularly used for monitoring the structural health of industrial pipes, but small defects are difficult to identify owing to the influence of the environment and pipe structure on the guided wave signal. In this paper, a high-sensitivity monitoring algorithm based on adaptive principal component analysis (APCA) for defects of pipes is proposed, which calculates the sensitivity index of the signals and optimizes the process of selecting principal components in principal component analysis (PCA). Furthermore, we established a comprehensive damage index (K) by extracting the subspace features of signals to display the existence of defects intuitively. The damage monitoring algorithm was tested by the dataset collected from several pipe types, and the experimental results show that the APCA method can monitor the hole defect of 0.075% cross section loss ratio (SLR) on the straight pipe, 0.15% SLR on the spiral pipe, and 0.18% SLR on the bent pipe, which is superior to conventional methods such as optimal baseline subtraction (OBS) and average Euclidean distance (AED). The results of the damage index curve obtained by the algorithm clearly showed the change trend of defects; moreover, the contribution rate of the K index roughly showed the location of the defects.