Feasibility Study for Using Piezoelectric-Based Weigh-In-Motion (WIM) System on Public Roadway

Haocheng Xiong,Yinning Zhang

doi:10.3390/app9153098

Abstract

Weigh-in-Motion system has been the primary selection of U.S. government agencies as the weighing enforcement for decades to protect the road pavement. In recent years, the number of trucks has increased by about 40% and in 2017, they travel 25% more annually than in 2016. The lack of the budget has slowed down the expansion of weighing enforcement to catch up with the growing workload of vehicle weighing. Unsupervised pavement section suffers more pavement damage and increased repairing cost. In this work, a piezoelectric material based WIM system (P-WIM) is developed. Such a system consists of several piezoelectric material disks that are capable of generating characteristic voltage output from passing vehicles. The axle loading of the vehicle can be determined by analyzing the voltage generated from the P-WIM. Compared to traditional WIM system, P-WIM requires nearly zero maintenance and costs 80% less on capital investment and less labor and effort to integrate. To evaluate the feasibility of this technology to serve as weighing enforcement on public roadways, prototype P-WIMs are fabricated and installed at a weigh station. The vehicle loading information provided by the weigh station is used to determine the force transmission percentage of the installed P-WIMs, which is an important parameter to determine the vehicles’ axle loading by generated voltage.

Highlights

This paper presented a proof-of-concept evaluation of an alternative to permanent WIM system with much lower cost using the piezoelectric material, which is named as piezoelectric material based WIM system (P-WIM)
The P-WIM consists of several piezoelectric disks sealed in a protective package made from engineering plastic
A P-WIM system designed for measuring the axle loading of the passing vehicle was introduced as a low-cost alternative to the conventional WIM system

Summary

Introduction

Compared with the static weighing system, weigh-in-motion (WIM) system provides the traffic loading data with less accuracy, but much less impact on the traffic flow [1]. The WIM systems weigh vehicles at highway speeds and introduce much less delay to the transportation network than the static one. For these reasons, WIM systems have been widely deployed to support transportation infrastructure management [2,3,4]. WIM systems have been widely deployed to support transportation infrastructure management [2,3,4] It serves as primary weight compliance checkpoints of commercial trucks for weight enforcement [5,6]

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