City students develop tech to lessen jumbo mishaps on tracks

Two city-based school students today claimed to have developed a sound wave-based technology that would help railways control the increasing number of elephant fatalities on tracks.
With reports of a large number of deaths of Asiatic elephants on tracks every year, Prabhav Chawla1 and Ahan Mukhopadhyay, both students of class XII of Sri Ram School, have approached the Delhi Zoo seeking permission to perform tests in this regard.
The proposal came on the occasion of World Wildlife Day the theme of which this year is 'The Future of Elephants is in Our Hands'.
The students have written a paper which gives a detailed study on the causes of such accidents, current preventive methods employed by the government, and have proposed the infra-sound technology or Doppler Effect-based formula to overcome this problem.

"We propose to use sound waves to repel elephants from the tracks of an approaching train and hence prevent such fatalities. Elephants have an audibility range of 12-12000 Hz and can hear infra-sound. Through experimental means, a particular frequency can be determined at which the animal experiences minor irritation.
"A device emitting the sound of this frequency can be placed in trains and switched on when the train is passing through elephant-bound areas. This can either be done manually or done automatically using a GPS, which will work along with the device," the students said in their paper.
They said that big storms such as hurricanes produce distinctive infrasonic signature, while earthquakes produce distinct infra-sound pulses that can travel thousands of miles. Elephants react quickly to these pulses and tend to run away even before the disaster strike, they said.