Customized Design of Inductive Sensor for an Early Detection of Cracks in Indian Rail Transport

The objective of this paper is to provide a solution to a serious issue in today’s world of transportation through railways. The practice to examine the flaws which leads to serious effects in rail track is rail inspection. Among the world countries, Indian railways are the fourth-longest, but when it comes to reliability and safety it lags to provide world standard. As a result, if the track is damaged, it leads to severe loss of valuable human lives and property. This derailment in tracks is caused due to cracks in the rails. Therefore, an early crack detection and protection system is required to save the lives. This paper proposes a customized design of an inductive transducer and crack detection system on railroad tracks to avoid the train accidents. Existing method uses the manpower to identify the cracks and this involves human errors. So, the drawbacks in the existing method can be reduced by the automatic system. Customized inductive sensor is designed and developed using ANSYS. A scaled down model of a cart is fabricated and the inductive sensor is assembled at beneath surface of the cart. The track is acting as a part of the magnetic core for the inductive sensor and voltage is induced in the sensor. The sensor voltage is calibrated to distinguish the magnitude of voltage from the normal to crack.