Accurate and portable weigh-in-motion system for manifesting air cargo

Abstract

An automated and portable weigh-in-motion system has been developed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory for the purpose of manifesting cargo onto aircraft. The system has an accuracv range of {plus_minus} 3.0% to {plus_minus} 6.0% measuring gross vehicle weight and locating the center of balance of moving vehicles at speeds of 1 to 5 mph. This paper reviews the control/user interface system and weight determination algorithm developed to acquire, process, and interpret multiple sensor inputs. The development effort resulted in a self-zeroing, user-friendly system capable of weighing a wide range of vehicles in any random order. The control system is based on the STANDARD (STD) bus and incorporates custom-designed data acquisition and sensor fusion hardware controlled by a personal computer (PC) based single-board computer. The user interface is written in the ``C`` language to display number of axles, axle weight, axle spacing, gross weight, and center of balance. The weighing algorithm developed will function with any linear weight sensor and a set of four axle switches per sensor