INDIA: Kerala Rail Development Corp has signed a memorandum of understanding to use technology developed by Lab2Market for the real-time monitoring of civil engineering structures in areas prone to land settlement and flooding on the planned Silver Line.
The 530 km double-track 200 km/h railway is intended to link Thiruvananthapuram and Kasaragod.
The sensors use optic fibre Bragg grating technology to provide both on-demand and continuous data on engineering structures, with alerts if any damage is detected. The sensors would be customised for each structure and location.
‘While trains are routinely inspected, structural damage is more likely to go unnoticed during manual inspection’, said V Ajith Kumar, Managing Director of Kerala Rail. ‘We welcome the channelling of innovative solutions towards strengthening Silver Line the infrastructure and taking preventative action against potential rail casualties’.
Lab2Market is a startup incubated by the Society for Innovation & Development at the Indian Institute of Science.
‘There is a gap between the critical need for rail safety, and the lack of systems that constantly monitor both trains and railway structures in real-time’, suggested Sreenivasa Rao Ganapa, co-founder of L2M Rail. ‘Structural defects are generally identified only when an accident occurs, and preventative identification of weak links could have helped avoid mass casualties, like the recent Mexico metro overpass collapse.
‘The potential of FPG sensor technology is immense, and its application is not just restricted to rail monitoring, but to any field that necessitates constant, real-time monitoring and timely warning alerts to identify damage.’
