Development of an alarming system for an unmanned railway crossing using vibration transmission in railway track

Abstract

In present work, a finite element model of railway track having fish plate joint is developed to study the vibration transmission characteristics of the railway track and fish plate joint when vibration transmitted through it. Numerical simulation of FE model has been done in a commercial tool ANSYS Workbench. In railway tracks, there must be gaps between two tracks for expansion of the rails. A fish plate joint is used to join both the ends of the joint. Unmanned railway crossings across the country is a major concern of safety and hence, it is important to provide an automated alarming mechanism which can sense the arrival of train. Vibration of the track can be used to sense the arrival of train. But there are number of fish plate joints in the railway track and it is important to study the role of the joint in vibration transmission. Hence, a model having multiple tracks have been designed to identify the effect of fish plate joint in transmission of vibration. A small-scale test model has also been developed to validate the accuracy of the results obtained in the ANSYS by comparing the natural frequency of the model with experimental test setup. It is concluded from the present work that, there is very less decay in the vibration signal when it passes through the joint and hence joint may be neglected for further dynamic study in railway tracks. The distance at which we can get the genuine vibration signal is calculated as 85 meters. So, the vibration sensing device used to sense the vibration signal must be put within this distance.