The Titan Corporation

Westinghouse Air Brake Company

Wda Contracts Corporation

Roger P Woodward

Anthony E Smart

Robert C Kull

John B Abbiss

Charles H Seiter

Method and apparatus for a railway navigation system which provides information defining the position of a railway vehicle on a track system. The system uses an on-board computer with a track database representing the locations of the rail lines, including locations of curves and switches. The system uses a turn rate indicator and a speedometer means to obtain a value for the curvature of the track on which the railway vehicle moves. Curvature data so obtained is compared with data in the track database to determine the position of the railway vehicle in relation to curves and switches of the track system.

Rail navigation system

A surface energy meter (10) includes a probe (18) having two spaced apart electrodes (38 and 40) with a centrally located fluid dispensing head (36). When a fluid of known surface tension is dispensed onto a material (22) having unknown surface energy, the surface energy is determined by the volume of a fluid drop (42) which bridges between electrodes (38 and 40). The volume of the fluid drop (42) is closely regulated using a stepper motor (24) and by tracking the number of steps and volume dispensed per step required for the fluid drop (42) to expand to a point where the electrodes (38 and 40) are bridged. When a fluid of unknown surface tension is to be tested, materials having known surface energies are used.

Surface energy meter

A plurality of lasers, each regulated to operate at a particular temperature, are supported by a manifold to direct coherent light into space. The regulation may be provided by producing pulses of a trickle current of a particular magnitude through the laser, measuring the voltage required to produce the trickle current and adjusting the characteristics of a thermoelectric member in accordance with the magnitude of such voltage to adjust the rate at which the thermoelectric member transfers heat from the laser. The lasers produce substantially parallel and thin beams of light in pairs. The light beams in each pair provide an optimum angle for the interception by such paired beams of particles having individual trajectories in space. These particles scatter the light to a receiving lens system disposed within the manifold. The received light then passes through masks which restrict the collected light to a spatial pattern corresponding to the pattern of the light beams from the lasers. The received light beams passing through the masks are detected to produce signals indicative of the light in such beams. The manifold temperature may be regulated to maintain the optical characteristics of the lasers and the receiving system at a constant and optimum value. The regulation may be provided by disposing heat sleeves on the manifold periphery, preferably in both axial and annular directions, and disposing in each heat sleeve a porous wick and a material convertible between liquid and gaseous forms. At positions above the regulated temperature, the liquid vaporizes and travels through the wick toward cooler spots where it vaporizes.

Improvements in a system for determining atmospheric data relating to

Light from a moving airborne vehicle and scattered from atmospheric particles produces at first and second detectors at the vehicle, signals which are spatially and spectrally filtered, and conditioned by amplification and special filtering and converted to digital signals. The digital signals are edited and accepted if they satisfy certain conditions pertaining to a threshold variable with the average amplitude level of the noise plus signals. The digital signals from each particle are grouped. A centroid, based upon a weighting of the signals in each group with amplitude and time, is determined to represent the most probable time at which the particle crossed the peak of the illuminated region. The peak amplitude of each signal from the first detector is paired with the peak amplitude of the successive signals from the second detector. The time difference between the paired signals, and their product amplitudes, are determined. The amplitude products are separated into successive bins on the basis of the time difference between the signals in each pair and are averaged. The bin with the greated average amplitude product and the two (2) adjacent bins are selected. The median time in the bin having the highest average product amplitude is used as a first approximation to the transmit time of a particle. An estimate with enhanced accuracy may be obtained by calculating the 'centroid', by a method analogous to that used above, of a narrow distribution of events selected from those within the three (3) chosen bins.

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San Francisco, CA, United States of America

Roger P Woodward