Denoising of lcr wave signal of residual stress for rail surface based on lifting scheme wavelet packet transform

According to the acousto elastic effect, the residual stress on the surface of the rail can be evaluated by measuring the change in the propagation velocity of ultrasonic waves, such as longitudinal critically refracted (LCR) waves on the surface of the rail. The LCR wave signal is often polluted by a variety of noise sources, coupled with the influence of the poor surface condition of the inspected component, which greatly reduces the detectability and online measurement ability of the LCR wave signal. This paper proposes the application of the lifting scheme wavelet packet transform (LSWPT) denoising method to solve the noise suppression problem of LCR wave signal. The traditional wavelet transform (WT), wavelet packet transform (WPT), as well as the lifting scheme wavelet transform (LSWT) and lifting scheme wavelet packet transform are compared and analyzed in the soft thresholding and hard thresholding processing of denoising ability and efficiency of the noisy LCR wave signal. The experimental results show that the LSWPT method has the characteristics of fast calculation speed and a good denoising effect, and it is an efficient method of denoising signals for on-line ultrasonic measurement of residual stress on the rail surface.