Paper
12 August 2004 Using radar to help mitigate truck overturn incidents on US interstate highways
Eugene F. Greneker, Ekkehart Otto Rausch
Author Affiliations +
Abstract
The operations of tractor-trailers, mixed with other vehicles on US interstates, has resulted in a number of major tractor-trailer overturn events which often cause traffic to stop for hours along a major traffic corridor because the wreckage physically blocks the corridor. In some cases, the blockage remains for a day or more if toxic substances are being carried by the tractor-trailer. Mixed vehicle use of the interstates coupled with the fact that some tractor-trailers with high center of gravity loads are driven too fast ensure that the overturn events experienced to date will continue. In a previous SPIE paper, the Georgia Tech Research Institute researchers demonstrated that an X-band radar (10.5 GHz) could detect the oscillation frequency of tractor-trailer trucks within 1,000 feet of the radar. This radar was used to control a vibration damper on a bridge to provide longer bridge life. Previous studies conducted by GTRI show that tractor-trailer trucks reflect several orders of magnitude more energy than passenger vehicles, vans and other smaller trucks. In many cases, the large tractor-trailer truck radar signature alone could be used to identify the trucks from the other traffic. However, since non-ranging homodyne radar was being used, it was not known if smaller radar cross section targets that were closer to the radar than the tractor-trailer trucks would have a larger radar signature. This paper examines the issues associated with identifying tractor-trailer truck radar signatures from the radar signatures of other vehicles within the antenna beam of a non-ranging homodyne radar.
© (2004) COPYRIGHT Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE). Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.
Eugene F. Greneker and Ekkehart Otto Rausch "Using radar to help mitigate truck overturn incidents on US interstate highways", Proc. SPIE 5410, Radar Sensor Technology VIII and Passive Millimeter-Wave Imaging Technology VII, (12 August 2004); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.543831
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KEYWORDS
Radar

Homodyne detection

Doppler effect

Signal processing

Radar signal processing

X band

Antennas

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