Study On Wheel/Rail Profilometers Based On The Smartphone

Intelligent instruments are measurement instruments (or system)containing microprocessors. Recent years, with the application of smartphones or PDA to intelligent instruments system, a good progress has been made in portable performance. But due to various reasons, there are some deficiencies about human-machine interface and Deep processing of data, so some research about instrument for portable wheel-rail is done in this paper as fellows.First, the present situation of the development of smartphone is studied. The performance of smartphone hardware resources (1GHz CPU frequency level 2 cache 3MB, memory, RAM488MB+ ROM512MB) in 2010 has already achieved the same level as that of PC in 1996; Its software resources can completely satisfy the needs of the intelligent instruments; Therefore, if the combination between smartphone and sensor(or data acquisition subsystem) which can provide Bluetooth or WIFI interface can be perfectly achieved, a monolithic and portable intelligent instrument or system can be made.Secondly, study has been done in software design for the measuring apparatus for wheel appearance, through detailed analysis about users' needs, conclusions have been made that the software for wheel/rail appearance may has the following characteristics:quick measurement and calculation, measured curves with larger proportion display on the screen, facilitating surveyors for judgment; check historical data immediately, etc. Advantages and disadvantages between the file management and the database management in system data management have been taken into account, and the comparison shows that the file management is more reasonable for this wheel profile measurement instrumentThirdly, on the base of a thorough investigation on the connotation of equivalent taper and the calculation method, a reliable way for calculating the equivalent taper algorithm has been established. Data may be placed on the same coordinate through the methods of translation, poor value, etc. and the minimum distance between wheel and rail may be checked over and over, roll Angle may be accumulated by method of cardinal increase, and the radius of the wheel contacting the rail may be calculated, so the equivalent taper values with various horizontal quantities may be found.A complete set of software has been completed based on the above results, and an application has been made into a smartphone operating system with 624MHz, Windows CE, the test result indicates that the wheel/rail profile measurement instrument software system has a new function of a browse of history data; what's more important, the equivalent taper value can be obtained within 5 seconds. Multiple tests have shown that the instrument software design is reasonable, without crashing, slow or memory leaks, etc.