Design of Temperature Monitoring for Wheel using Optical Sensor in Railway Safety System

One of the most crucial situation in railways is excess wheel temperature that leads to major disasters. Rise in temperature is majorly caused due to braking and defects in axle box, which leads to wheel skidding, derailment, hot wheel, irregularities in wheel and other safety complications. In this work, wheel temperature warning range is taken between 150 °C to 300 °C and this range is used to observe the stress and strain behavior on railway wheel in ANSYS Workbench software. Sensing temperature distribution is performed by steady state thermal analysis. The framework is taken from the thermal analysis to perform static structural analysis. The result obtained gives a good understanding of temperature distribution on wheel with respect to stress and strain from structural analysis. The obtained result from ANSYS is converted into equivalent wavelength shift. Design and simulation of Fiber Bragg Grating (FBG) sensor is performed in GratingMOD optical tool. Sensitivity of Fiber Bragg Grating is observed to be 13.08pm/°C for this temperature range and Bragg's wavelength 1550nm.