In history of railways , almost 90% of the accidents happens because of two reasons:
- Train comes away from track
- Track discontinuity
TRAIN COMES AWAY FROM TRACK
It means that track is not all problems but train moves out of track. This happens because Of lack of concentration of the people who works with track. For example when the nuts and bolts get loosed these sorts of problems will occur, where property loss will happen to both public and railways but not that much as the second case.
i) This happens because of terrorism attack, natural disaster. There will be damage to track which causes severe damage to both public and railways which in many cases have led to several deaths.
ü) By keeping such issues in mind, we have come up with an idea to detect the track discontinuity very sooner before the train reaches the accident zone.
Our project “railway track tracer” automatically traces the track discontinuity several kilometers ahead and alarms near by station and the Train about the track discontinuity.
- In our project, we use series of sensors which senses the continuity of the track by sensing the vibration in the track.
- When a train passes its vibration in track it travels with very great velocity than the train velocity so that it can be detected several kilometers ahead before the train.
In our project we use a series of sensors which detect the vibrations from the track. The output of the sensors are fed to the switching and rectifying circuit which processes the sensed signal ready to feed for the microcontroller. The processed signals are first fed to the opto couplers, output of which is fed to the microcontroller. The microcontroller decides from the received signal about the track discontinuity, and when a discontinuity is found in the track.
Block 1: Series of Sensors
We place the sensors at regular intervals in the track which senses the vibrations in the track when a train arrives. When a train moves with greater velocity the vibrations are experienced in the track for few kilometers ahead. The sensors capture these vibrations and pass them for processing.
Block 2: Switching and the Rectifying circuit
Every single sensor output is fed to a switching and rectifying circuit to determine the strength of vibration from the sensor and to process it to be suitable for the next level. Every switching circuit and the sensor pair is considered as a set (S1, S2, S3 and so on). Every set is connected to the microcontroller with suitable processing.
Block 3: Couplers
The couplers are the bridge between microcontroller and the switching circuit which prevents the microcontroller getting damaged from the high voltages.
Block 4: Microcontrollers
We use series of the microcontrollers to decide the defect area and the defect in the track.
Every slave microcontrollers (M1, M2, M3 and so on) are connected directly to the output of the few sets (S1, S2, S3) and the masters are connected to many slave microcontrollers. The slave micro controller decides the defect from processed signal. And the master controller detects the exact location of the defect area.
Block 5: Alarm signal
When a defect is detected the master signal is generated from the master controller which is connected to a necessary alarm device to warn the control room of the railways or the near by station or the train itself.