Advanced weigh-in-motion system for weighing vehicles at high speed

Abstract

A state-of-the-art, Advanced Weigh-In-Motion (WIM) system has been designed, installed, and tested on the west bound side of Interstate I-75/I-40 near the Knox County Weigh Station. The project is a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) between Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and International Road Dynamics, Inc. (IRD) sponsored by the Office of Uranium Programs, Facility and Technology Management Division of the Department of Energy under CRADA No. ORNL95-0364. ORNL, IRD, the Federal Highway Administration, the Tennessee Department of Safety and the Tennessee Department of Transportation have developed a National High Speed WIM Test Facility for test and evaluation of high-speed WIM systems. The WIM system under evaluation includes a Single Load Cell WIM scale system supplied and installed by IRD. ORNL developed a stand-alone, custom data acquisition system, which acquires the raw signals from IRD`s in-ground single load cell transducers. Under a separate contract with the Federal Highway Administration, ORNL designed and constructed a laboratory scale house for data collection, analysis and algorithm development. An initial advanced weight-determining algorithm has been developed. The new advanced WIM system provides improved accuracy and can reduce overall system variability by up to 30% over the existing high accuracy commercial WIM system.