Development Of Locomotive Power Monitor With Time-recording

Locomotive carries a number of high-power electrical equipments, which requires a stable supply of 110V DC to work properly, but the locomotive power system produces high voltage pulses, due to the opening and closing of some electrical equipment. High voltage pulses could bring deadly effects on the equipments and sometimes could lead to system crashes and other vehicle equipment failures. In order to analyze the cause of equipment failure, this thesis proposed a design of locomotive power monitoring instrument.This paper presented a design method of locomotive power monitor with time-recording. This method not only detected the voltage pulse of power, but also recorded the exact time when the high voltage pulses generated. This instrument provided strong evidence for failure analysis of the vehicle equipments. This paper gave a brief summary of the theory basis, design idea and technical details, and then introduced the design principle and method of hardware and software in this instrument in detail.The key point of the design of locomotive power monitor with time-recording was the hardware design. Two processors, PIC16F877 and TMS320F2812 were applied as the core processors of the instrument to build hardware circuit. The high-speed data acquisition capabilities of TMS320F2812 were made full use to achieve collection of a high locomotive voltage pulse power; The PIC16F877 MCU was applied to achieve the recoding of time when the pulses generated. Ferroelectric memory and E2PROM were used for external memory expansion of the two processors, to achieve a fast, high-capacity data storage. UART-to-USB Transfer Bridge--PL2303 chip was used to design USB interface circuit, which simplified the design of the development program and made it convenient for users.In the design of the software system, there were mainly three parts, Embedded DSP Systems Programming, PIC system programming and PC application development. In the CCS development environment, C language was used to write embedded DSP system program; in the MAPLAB-IDE development environment, C language was used to write PIC system program; in the LabVIEW development environment, PC user applications were programmed.The instrument has achieved a precise high-voltage pulse data acquisition, accurate time recording of pulse, and has been unanimously praised by users.