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OEM benefit: Vehicle manufacturers desire continuous feedback in monitoring key safety related sub-assemblies. In this application, engineers are calculating the remaining brake pad life by continuously monitoring the current thickness of the brake pad friction material. This information is used in scheduling preventative maintenance activities and avoiding safety incidents. Unplanned machine down time and field repair expenses in earthmoving equipment are cost prohibitive. Today, this technology allows OEM's to have high confidence, continuous feedback on this critical vehicle safety feature, avoiding expensive, unplanned repairs and to improve field “up time” performance. Application challenge: to develop a reliable linear position sensor that is suitable for continuous monitoring of brake pad material thickness in a high pressure, high temperature, high vibration and contaminated environment typical of large construction (earthmoving) vehicles.

Federal Motor Vehicle Safety aspirations are to improve the safety of commercial vehicles through the voluntary adoption of stability control systems in new vehicle designs. The current technologies available today for commercial truck Stability Control Systems (SCS) designs involve costly sensing components that in many applications are not ideally suited to the demands in these commercial applications. In particular, steering angle sensors (SAS) have been adapted from automotive passenger car applications and involve both contacting and non-contacting sensing solutions. These technologies have struggled in commercial vehicle applications with the lack of design standardization, packaging flexibility along with environmental durability and cost issues. This paper reviews the limitations of the existing sensing technologies used in these steering shaft angle sensing applications.