Railway Track Health Monitoring System Using IoT and ESP32: A Simulation-Based Approach on Wokwi Platform

Abstract: The railway transport system is of great importance due to its safety and capacity for performing efficiently. The purpose of this paper is to describe a get a way for monitoring the health of railway tracks by using an IoT device and an ESP32 microcontroller. This will be done using different types of sensors, including the MPU6050 Accelerometer, Ultrasonic, and DHT22 Temperature-Humidity Sensors. The proposed implementation is capable of measuring the vibration of the tracks and track buckling, detecting track defects, and monitoring the weather.

The data will be transmitted wirelessly to the ThinkSpeak cloud platform, which allows people to access the information in real-time. The Wokwi site was used for simulation of the proposed system. The results indicate that real-time monitoring of railway tracks is feasible, and indicate that the proposed system is capable of locating issues such as track buckling or cracks. Data will be sent out every 20 seconds (for a 50-meter stretch of track) by the proposed system for continuous tracking of the railway tracks and provides advanced warning to the rail operator about any potential issues with the railway tracks.

Keywords: Railway Track Monitoring, IoT, ESP32, MPU6050, ThingSpeak, Wokwi Simulation, Structural Health Monitoring, Wireless Sensor Networks