UCSD laser to hunt ‘tumors’ in railway lines

University of California San Diego has built a prototype laser to search for cracks inside rail lines, the San Diego Union-Tribune reports. UC San Diego engineers are preparing to test an experimental laser that looks for the kind of cracks inside railway lines that are responsible for many of the 130 or so derailments that occur nationwide each year.

The test will be
performed for government and industry officials next week in Kansas, where
UCSD’s railway inspection device will examine track at a ‘defect farm’ similar
to the one the university operates at Englekirk Center in Scripps Ranch.

The instrument will then
be returned to UCSD for further testing in a program largely underwritten by $1
million in support from the Federal Railroad Administration.

The experimental device
shoots a high-speed laser at rail lines, causing them to vibrate. The device
them uses microphones to capture and evaluate the sound. Anomalies represent
areas of rail that might be cracked and prone to failure.

The process "is like
looking for little tumors that grow every time a train passes over," said
Francesco Lanza, the UCSD structural engineer who is leading the project.
"If we can spot these cracks, we might be able to fix them before they
become a problem.

"There have been railroad
systems in the U.S. for almost 200 years," Lanza said. "And trains have become
progressively better. But derailments still occur, often because of the stress
the rails take from repeated usage by heavy-tonnage railway cars. Poorly
manufactured rail lines also are a factor in some derailments."

Lanza said that the
Federal Railroad Administration increased its efforts to find better ways to
examine rail lines after a BNSF train derailed near Superior, Wis., in 1992,
leaking more than 20,000 gallons of chemicals. Various companies and
universities have been looking for better ways to evaluate track, including
UCSD, which also has a campus site where it is examining how and why train
tracks buckle.