Indurad

In heavy industries, especially in mining and raw materials applications, wireless position measurement and ranging by means of microwave based radar systems eliminates many problems of conventional, mainly optical, measurement systems. In contrast to laser light, microwaves are insensitive against contamination of the application environment due to dirt, dust, or vapour. In the first part of the current project, a radar based position measurement system for railway freight waggons is to be developed. The system determines and tracks the lateral position of passing freight cars in the filling station and thus accurately allows to control the loading process. Therefore, overfilling and loss of material due to the gap between the waggons can be avoided. The waggons are equipped with surface acoustic wave based identification (ID) tags, which are used as a reference point for the position measurement, and furthermore allow to recognize the wagons ID number. A second challenge is the development of a novel 2D/3D positioning system for general positioning applications, based on actively modulated radar reflectors. In contrast to existing cooperative radar systems, the reflector units are small sized and very low power devices, and may even operate without a own energy source by using energy harvesting techniques.