Inspection of Rail Sweep Using Matrix Pencil Method Based-Radar Target Identification

In this paper, the radar target identification system for inspection of rail sweep is proposed. In the proposed system, the short pulse is transmitted to impinge the rail and the signal scattered from the rail is then received to perform the signal processing for identification. The matrix pencil method is employed to extract poles from the late-time response of the scattering signal. Extracted poles are exploited as unique signatures of the individual rail defection. One of the most defections due to the manufacturing production errors is the rail sweep. In this paper, simulations were conducted to validate that the extracted poles from the response of the normal rail is different from those of the swept rail. The BS100A rails with different sweep angles i.e. 0°, 10°, 15°, 30° and 45° are modeled by using CST microwave studio. The simulation results show that poles extracted from the late-time response of the normal rail are significantly different from those of the swept one. The simulation results confirmed the superiority of the proposed system over the conventional one using the visual inspection.