NDE Methods for Corrosion Monitoring in Railroad Tank Cars
- Federal Railroad Administration
This report discusses the use of various nondestructive evaluation (NDE) methods for detecting and characterizing corrosion defects in tank cars. Several tank car panels with a real corrosion defect as well as simulated corrosion defects were fabricated from the actual tank car. Advanced NDE methods such as Phased Array Ultrasonic Testing, Electromagnetic Acoustic Transducers, backscatter X-ray imaging, and three-dimensional laser scanning metrology were explored on the test panels. While these NDE methods demonstrated good feasibility, further efforts should be considered and explored in a more systematic way that will allow for a better understanding of the capabilities and limitations of these NDE methods. Also, future efforts should consider building more test panels for the corrosion NDE demonstration.