The current invention relates to milling machines for milling asphalt or concrete in roads, sidewalks, parking lots, or other paved surfaces. While milling and resurfacing a paved surface, the milling machines often encounter metal objects which are covered partially or completely by the paved surface such as manhole covers or railroad tracks. In such circumstances, if the metal object isn't detected beforehand, the object, milling tools on the milling machine, or both may be damaged. Some inventions of the prior art disclose metal detectors in combination with a pavement resurfacing machine.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,077,601 to Lloyd, which is herein incorporated by reference for all that it contains, discloses a machine for providing hot-in-place recycling and repaving an existing asphalt-based pavement, in which the pavement is first heated.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,786,696 to Weaver et al., which is herein incorporated by reference for all that it contains, discloses a metal detector which utilizes digital signal processing and a microprocessor to process buffers of information which is received at a periodic rate. The metal detector is able to determine the depth of a target by comparing the quadrature phase components received from first and second receive antennas. The size of the target is determined by reference to a look-up table based on the depth factor and the signal amplitude determined for the target object.
U.S. patent application Ser. No. 11/837,347, filed on Aug. 10, 2007 by Hall et al., which is herein incorporated by reference for all that it contains, discloses a metal detector for a milling machine.
U.S. patent application Ser. No. 11/774,635 by Hall et al, filed on Jul. 9, 2007, which is herein incorporated by reference for all that it contains, discloses a metal detector for an asphalt milling machine.