Friday, 14 October 2011

How Your Traffic Radar SignsWork

By Jessi McCafferty


When you use a microwave, you might be tall enough to see the food cooking from the door, but you can not see the particular microwaves. Radar beams use microwave radiation, so those are invisible, too. In a microwave oven, the waves radiate out, hitting the food from all directions. But when radar is used in radar traffic signs, the waves are sent in only one direction, at advancing traffic. Microwaves always travel in straight lines, so it's just a matter of pointing the beams at traffic to get exact and reliable readings.

If you concentrate on radar and microwaves, it may not be immediately obvious the way in which the beams can measure traffic speed. In fact , microwaves heat and cook things. These radar beams are safe , however , and not actually the same or delivered in the same way as the waves in your range. But how are they suitable for measuring the rate of traffic?

The Science Behind Metal and Microwaves

Anyone that has ever unintentionally microwaved a fork in a serving dish of food or utilized a dish that had a metal lining knows that metal and microwaves don't mix. Anyone who has left metal in a microwave has probably either seen a show of sparks or ruined the whole stove, derive on how enormous the object was and how long it was left in the microwave. But why can't we microwave anything metal? Microwaves penetrate food and liquids to heat them up and cook them. It customarily has effects on the water content in food, heating that to market cooking. Thin metal like aluminum foil contains no water for the microwaves to affect, so the plate or fork metal molecules heat up and can create sparks and burn because that energy has to go somewhere.

Heavier metals like that forgotten fork won't likely let microwaves to penetrate it for various reasons. This sort of metal reflects the waves completely. This will cause the waves to hop away from the metal, where they bounce off the walls of the cooker and windup up reacting frequently.

When the radar beams from traffic radar signs are pointed at vehicles, they hit that large metal object and reflect back so the speed of the moving automobile can be measured by something we like to call The Doppler Effect.

Traffic Speed Signs & The Doppler Effect

The Doppler Effect is easier to understand if you think of the way a sound changes as it approaches, reaches you and then passes. The pitch of something similar to a train whistle will be different in all 3 of those positions relative to you, although the sound the train makes never changes. A driver holding down his horn as he approaches and passes will create an identical effect. The pitch will have a tendency to drop as it reaches our ears, and continue to do so as it passes, though the sound the horn is making is actually the same.

Equiped Radar With Driver Feedback Signs

The radar traffic signal that's sent towards the oncoming cars has a specific strength and signature. The signal that is sent back will be different based primarily on the rate of the car that it bounced off. The most significant difference between the signal that's sent and the one which returns is measured according to The Doppler Theory to judge the velocity of the vehicle.




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