Intelligent Measuring & Control System For Wagon Carrying-saddles Abrasions

Carrying-saddles, which are installed between wagons' rolling bearings and bogie side-racks, play important roles on connecting bearings with side-racks, orienting and transferring loads. The abrasions of each part of carrying-saddles exerted huge impacts on wagons' dynamics performance. It is necessary to examine and repair carrying-saddles in good season abiding by the examine-and-repair regulations in order to guarantee the running securities of rolling stocks. In this paper, an advanced measuring system for the abrasions of carrying-saddles was developed to meet the needs of the measuring scenes. The system, whose core is the industrial computer and test & control board, and groundwork is the data acquisition system based on eddy-current sensors, realized automatic testing for carrying-saddles abrasions controlled by the industrial computer.After the careful investigation on the former measuring equipments and methods, this paper designed an intelligent measuring & control system for carrying-saddles abrasions. The functions of the system were defined by the software on the basis of modularization hardware, which made the system access to comprehensive scope of computer resource, and enhanced the flexibility of the system. The system can measure multi-point abrasions of the measured objects simultaneously with multi-channel eddy-current sensors, the industrial computer and test & control board, to reduce the labor intensity of the workers and enhance the efficiency. Finally the automatic measuring for carrying-saddles abrasions was achieved.A high-speed calibration system was also designed, which can rapidly calibrate multi-channel sensors one by one. The core of the calibration system is the industrial computer and test & control board, and its standard quantities are the output impulses of the photoelectric coder. Employing the itinerant measuring & control system by the industrial computer, and adopting the fashion ofdouble-channel direct read, outputs of the A/D Acquisition Board and Pulse Counting Board were read directly with high-precision and high-speed. With the data-processing program, digital filtering was access to the output impulses of the coder, and then the impulses were converted into the real abrasions to realize the precise quantification correspondence of the sensors' output voltages and carrying-saddles' abrasions. Thus a reliable standard was given to the automatic measuring for carrying-saddles' abrasions.The whole system combined the advanced measuring & control technology with powerful computer resources, worked out a new method for measuring the abrasions of wagons' carrying-saddles, and enhanced the automation level of carrying-saddles' examine-and-repair.