Coude Load Sensing System - Overview
- Rodell Agdinaoay
The coude azimuth carousels mechanical design utilizes a load sharing system via adjustable “truck” bearings to help account for uneven load distribution and varying stiffness across the structure.
The adjustability of the bearings are from a wedge mechanism that sits between the coude platfrom and the truck block.
The load of the coude structure is spread across 96 truck bearings with the following arrangement and spacing.
To identify the peak loads on each truck bearing a weigh station/load sensing system was implemented to verify operating and performance requirements, though currently the system is used for preventive maintenance.
The load sensing system basically consist of a load cell sensor situated under the rail and connected to a charge amplifier. The sensor is a piezo transducer where it produces a charge due to forces acted upon it, while the charge amplifier converts the charge into a usable voltage output.
As an on-going effort to increase reliability the load sensing system was extended from a stand alone system to an integrated facility system. Doing this allows some level of repeatability along with the ability to archive the captured data. The expanded system utilizes remote IO with a Analog to Digital module to read the +/-10VDC output voltage from the charge amplifier along with a output module to toggle the measure/reset input to the charge amplifier. The data readings from the remote IO is connected to the Coude LIC which has the code to read the voltages and control the measure/reset signal.
The data capture page details the procedure on how data is captured and stored.