The Solar sleeper, from Pfister Waagen Bilanciai GmbH, is a modular system featuring a series of individual measuring sleepers that, depending on requirements, are arranged in series - a typical arrangement being seven measuring sleepers.

These are connected by a high-precision measuring amplifier. On the basis of this design, wheel, axle and bogie-wise weighing may be performed to calculate the wagon and the total train weight. Due to these properties, Solar is suited for load monitoring, safety weighing and track section class monitoring.
The assignment of the wagon weights to the weighed wagons is performed to a precision class of 0.5 to OIML R 106, regardless of the direction of travel. Furthermore, Solar detects and subtracts the weights of the traction vehicles within the string of wagons, irrespective of their position.
The sleeper consists of sheet steel structure with the dimensions of a conventional concrete sleeper.
Special flexible ring load cells and the necessary load absorption elements are located on the sleeper. This arrangement is, to a large extent, impervious to soiling, water and snow.
Solar is embedded without a foundation in the existing ballast. The influence of ballast movements is eliminated to a large extent by the implementation of additional lateral force sensors that establish and evaluate any weighing down of the measuring sleepers.
The measuring electronics are linked to a standard PC via an interference resistant optical fibre. The latter evaluates and displays the weighing data via verifiable Pfister software. m

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Pfister Waagen Bilanciai GmbH is based in Augsburg, Germany. www.pfisterwaagen.de