Research And Design Of Laser Snow Depth Meter Along Railway Line

Railway is the main artery of the national economy,and ensuring the safety of railway transportation is of great strategic significance to the development of the national economy and society.The heavy snowfall along the railway will seriously affect the safe operation of the railway and endanger people’s lives and property.Railway departments need to accurately and real-time monitor the intensity of snowfall along the railway,eliminate potential snow disasters,and ensure the safe operation of trains.Manual snowfall measurement has poor real-time performance,large random errors,time-consuming and labor-intensive,and does not conform to the development trend of automatic snowfall observation.However,the existing automatic snow depth meter is affected by the complex environment such as vibration along the railway and strong electromagnetic interference,and the measurement error is large.It is not applicable to the observation of snowfall along the railway.In order to overcome the shortcomings of the snow measurement methods mentioned above,this paper adopted principle of phase ranging to develop a laser snow depth meter suitable for railways.It can real-time monitor the snow depth along the railway.It has the advantages of small size,light weight and easy installation,it can operate stably even in extreme cold weather.In the hardware design,the STM32F407 chip is selected as the main controller,and the power circuit,laser modulation transmitting circuit,laser receiving signal processing circuit,tilt measurement circuit,heating circuit and communication circuit are built.In the software design,Keil u Vision5 is selected as the programming environment,the development language is C language,and software modules such as phase difference measurement software,inclination measurement software,heating drive software,and communication software are integrated.In the Visual Studio 2012 environment,the host computer software was developed using C# language to receive,display and save snow depth data in real time.Considering that the complex environment along the railway will erode and interfere with the laser snow depth gauge,the designed laser snow depth gauge has been tested for circuit board,performance,high and low temperature,and electromagnetic compatibility.The test results show that This laser snow depth meter can meet the needs of snowfall observation along the railway.