NDE Methods for Corrosion Monitoring in Railroad Tank Cars

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.