Automotive Crack Detection for Railway Track Using Ultrasonic Sensorz

Abstract

In the fast developing country, people are facing many accidents; it would be undesirable for any nation to losing their life for unwanted cause. Railways are one of the important transports in India. There is a need for manual checking to detect the crack on railway track and always railway personnel takes care of this issue, even though the inspection is made regularly. Sometimes the crack may unnotice. Because of this the train accident or derailment may occur. In order to avoid this situation and automate the railway crack detection has been proposed. Here ultrasonic sensor is used to detect the crack in the railway track by measuring distance from track to sensor, if the distance is greater than the assigned value the microcontroller identifies there is a crack, also it tells the exact location of the crack by the formula “DISTANCE=SPEED*TIME”. While the checking process is going on, the train may approach, it is identified by the vibration sensor and gives alert to the microcontroller, thereby shrinks the size of the robot between the two tracks. After the train has crossed it returns to its normal position and continue its checking process. Keywords: track; ultrasonic sensor; inflator; sensor unit; control unit