Safety flight of aircrafts requires that the aircraft center of gravity (CG) must fall within specified limits established
by the manufacturer. However, the aircraft CG depends not only on the structure of planes, but also on the
passengers and their luggage. The current method of estimating the weight of passengers and luggage by the average
weight may result in a violation of this requirement. To reduce the discrepancy between the actual weight and
estimated weight, we propose a method of improving the accuracy of calculating the CG of the plane by weighing
the passengers and their personal luggage. This method is realized by a Weigh-In-Motion (WIM) system installed at
boarding gates based on optical fiber Bragg grating (FBG) technology. One prototype of WIM is fabricated and
tested at lab. The resolution of this system is 2 kg and can be further improved by advanced manufacture technology.
With the accurate weight of passengers and luggage coming from the WIM system and the locations of passengers
and luggage obtained from boarding cards, the aircraft CG can be calculated correctly. This method can be applied
into other fields, such as escalators, boarding gates for ferries.
Recently, many accidents were reported that some passengers were unfortunately restrained and killed at the gaps
between the Platform Screen Doors (PSDs) and the doors of the subway trains. In this paper, one proposal of real time
monitoring system based on optical time domain reflectrometer (OTDR) to detect the intrusions at these gaps is
presented. In this method the locations and weight of intrusions can be obtained by detecting the abrupt power loss of
backscattering light caused by the weight of intrusions upon the microbending sensor heads. This method can be easily
multiplexed and extended into a multi-function sensing system, such as monitoring the temperature, smoking and the
strains in the tracks, or applied in other fields, such as escalators, board gates for ferries or planes.
A portable, multi-function WIM sensing system based on Fiber Bragg Grating (FBG) technology is developed to
measure the total weight, the distribution of weight of vehicle in motion (the weights of left front, right front, left rear
and right rear wheels respectively), the distance of wheels axles and distance between left and right wheels. Currently the
speed of vehicle to be tested can be up to 15 mph, the full scope of measurement for this system is 4000 lbs, and the
static sensitivity of sensor head is 20 lbs. This system has been tested respectively at Stevens' campus and Army base.
Compared to other schemes, our method has a number of advantages such as immune to electromagnetic interference,
high repeatability, lightweight, low power consumption, high sensitivity to dynamic strain caused by load of vehicles in
high-speed. The accuracy of whole system can be improved by simulating the mathematical model of sensor heads and
improving the quality of manufacture as well as the calibration condition in the future.
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