Abstract
The weigh-in-motion (WIM) system is a necessary piece of equipment for an intelligent road. It can provide real-time vehicle weight and lateral distribution data on wheel load to effectively support pavement structure design and service life analysis for autonomous driving. This paper proposed an enhanced weigh-in-motion sensors system using Fabry–Pérot (F-P) cavity fiber optical technology. Laboratory testing was performed to evaluate the feasibility of the proposed system and field application was conducted as well. The laboratory results show that the traffic loads could be obtained by measuring the center wavelength changes in the embedded F-P Cavity tunable filter. The laboratory results also show that the vehicle load and the number of vehicle axles can be estimated based on the system transfer function between the dynamic loading and the wavelength variation. The field application indicates that the weighting accuracy of the proposed system could reach 94.46% for moving vehicles, and the vehicle passing speed is the potentially relevant factor. The proposed system also has the ability to estimate the number of vehicle axles and the loading position, and the precision could reach 97.1% and 300 mm, respectively.
Highlights
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This paper proposes an embedded hydraulic F-P cavity WIM system, which is designed to provide a low-cost and high-accuracy solution to existing WIM systems
According to the multibeam interference theory, the F-P cavity interference light intensity is given by Equation (1)
Summary
Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. The bending plate and load cells have a metal plate several strain gauges beneath them, to acquire the vehicle load by measuring the deformation of the metal plate This type of WIM sensor requires the vehicle to pass the metal plate with a low operating speed, between 5 km/h and 15 km/h, to accurately determine axle loads [8,9,10,11]. Investigating the response of fiber optic sensors with package structure under complex dynamic loads and establishing the mechanical response model of the package structure can help optimize the vehicle weight estimation algorithms to improve the performance of the WIM system [29]. The performance of the system, including accuracy and temperature compensation under different vehicles loads in motion, wheel positions, speed and temperature, was evaluated by laboratory and field tests. The results proved that the proposed system was a promising, low-cost, reliable and practical alternative to current WIM systems
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