Hi,
So, i'm building a railway locomotive from scratch ( www.lms10000.org ) - Yes, I know it silly...
We need to monitor our 247 Litre, 16cylinder diesel engine, and as it was built in the 1940s, it has no electronic systems at all on it. So i've built a system out of an arduino mega that can monitor things like oil pressure, water temperature, air temp etc. etc. For all these, there is a sufficiently robust and easily available sensor.
What i'm having trouble with is finding the following sensors;
Something to detect RPM (hall effect or similar)
Measure exhaust temperature (upto 1200deg F)
Measure air inlet pressure (it's a turbo, so 2.5bar max abs press)
Measure individual cylinder fuel pressure (400 Bar+)
I can find some sensors that cover these ranges, but they are usually not suited for the loud, noisy, oily constantly vibrating environment inside a locomotive. For example, while the "reading RPM" demo (http://playground.arduino.cc/Main/ReadingRPM ) would work fine, the sensor would last about 2 minutes.
I suspect that there are automotive sensors that would be useful, (especially for the RPM and inlet pressure) but I haven't been able to figure out which ones. Does anyone here have experience of which parts have worked well in these applications, and can be easily interfaced to an arduino?
Mark B