Design of instrumentation for flatness measurement of railroads

Transportation safety issues are very important; one of which is related to a mode of land-based transport in particular a railroad train. This research thus develops and designs a flatness measurement system consisting of multiple sensors to determine whether railroads are flat. The method used in this study is to deploy sensors for measuring flatness on railway carriages from one railway station to another. The measurements provide field data about translational and rotational shifts of position and angle in particular locations. The magnitudes of the shifts are obtained from the Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) integrated sensor that contains Accelerometer Sensor, Compass Magnetometer, Gyroscope, Air Pressure Sensor and GPS. LabVIEW 2013 is here used in cooperation with GUI systems equipped with a data logger for automatic data saving.