Issue link: https://cp.revolio.com/i/854494
Greyhound Lines ships packages daily through their Package Express Service. There are over 2,700 hundred Greyhound Package Express headquarters around the country, and approximately 20 packages are shipped from each location daily. Greyhound is considered a trusted provider of time- critical and cost-effective shipping. The company offers an affordable alternative for parcel shipment and delivery by reserving space for packages on almost every bus route. In addition, e-commerce giant Amazon.com has expressed interest in using bus transportation to ship packages and has filed a patent for this type of delivery under "Mobile Pickup Locations". This method of delivery would utilize a transit style bus and drop the package at a bus stop locker for customer retrieval [Bhatt]. With packaged products being shipped daily via motorcoach buses, vibration data from these vehicles could prove useful in package design for products being shipped in this manner. This paper highlights the methods utilized in acquiring vibration inputs in the cargo-hold of various motorcoach buses, the analysis of the data sets, and the recommendations for laboratory simulation. 2. Data Collection This experiment was conducted in a partnership with Vance Travel Services, a privately owned charter bus company in Anderson, South Carolina. The owner, previously a manager at Greyhound, had extensive knowledge of the Greyhound Package Express System. The buses at the company were comparable to the motor coach buses that Greyhound operates. A trip schedule was obtained, and data recording was planned around specific trips. The data recorder used to instrument the buses was a Lansmont Corporation (Monterey, CA) 9X30 field data recorder. The recorder was mounted on the interior of the cargo hold at the rear of the bus using a magnetic wall mount, Fig. 1. This location was used for all trips except the Washington trip. A different bus was used for the Washington trip, and the only place suitable for the magnetic mount was the front of the cargo hold. This was considered in the analysis of the data. The recorder was placed in the same orientation for every trip, with the y-axis oriented vertically, the z-axis longitudinally, and the x-axis laterally, Fig. 2. Table 1 contains the important recording setup parameters used throughout this study. 19 ista views • July 2017 • www.ista.org > MORE ON PAGE 20 Figure 1: Bus cargo-hold location and location of data recorder. Figure 2: Recorder orientation and mounting. Timer Interval Event Recording Time Sampling Rate Every 30 seconds 2 seconds 1000 samples/second Recording Parameters Table 1: Recording Parameters