Research on the Damage Diagnosis for Rails with a New 3D Scanning Method

Abstract

During the process of railgun launching, due to the large current across the interface between the rails and the armature, a series of damage phenomena, i.e. gouging, edge erosion, deposition, etc., will be appeared on the rails. Those phenomena not only shorten the rails’ lifetime but also affect the interior ballistic performance. Therefore, to understand the effect of these different forms of the rail degradation, it is necessary to obtain the surface geometry appearance of the rails. A new three-dimensional surface scanning technology based on the binocular stereovision theory is proposed to adapt complex in-bore environment. Verification experiment shows that this surface scanning technology is feasible, but still needs improvement.