THE DESIGN AND DEVELOPMENT OF A HIGHWAY SPEED ROAD PROFILOMETER 780064

This paper discusses the development of the Road Profilometer which is a Chevrolet 20 Series Van instrumented with transducers and data acquisition equipment to measure and record the magnitudes of frequencies present in road surfaces. The information collected provides data for vehicle structural and suspension system development. The transducers include two non-contacting, vertical displacement transducers mounted on each side of the vehicle and two vertically orientated accelerometers placed directly above the displacement transducers. The vertical displacement optical transducers utilize lasers for illuminating the road surface. Vehicle speed and distance data is accumulated from a non-contacting optical transducer employing an optical correlation technique. Data acquisition, digitizing and encoding, and recording of data on a digital tape recorder is controlled by a microcomputer.