Hot Box and Hot Wheel detectors are trackside devices designed to monitor axle, wheel, brake temperatures and to indicate any overheating which could lead to derailments and transmits this data to the traffic control and monitoring section. This is an unmanned system, which consists of high speed pyrometers installed at axle box level to check the temperature in near axle and far axle and at the track level to measure the wheel temperature. These pyrometers are connected with real time embedded data acquisition system that wakes up on train arrival to capture and analyze the data from all pyrometers.
The real time software possesses the intelligence to process the recorded data and produces the report with axle wise temperature information and transmits the data to Traffic Control or Monitoring Station. The cut-off limits and the alarm limits can be set by the user for flagging the hot axles, hot wheel & cold wheels.
The system was developed along with IIT-Kanpur as a part of Technology Mission for Railway Safety