System Applications - Aerospace

Wind Tunnel Testing Data Acquisition System Summary: The requirements for the functionality of the wind tunnel data acquisition system are well within the capabilities of our DAQ Director™ application. We also met all of the customer's signal conditioning and data rate requirements as well as the short delivery schedule of six weeks for an integrated system.

A major airplane manufacturer was looking for a custom data system for a wind tunnel application. The specific application is for measuring hot engine gases. The data system provides system setup, calibration, auto-balance, data acquisition, checking of limits and "hooks" for the customer's LabVIEW® software data displays. It is also the control and tunnel health monitoring system. Once data is recording, the model is moved for up to four seconds by a hydraulic system. Data recording stops, the system resets and the scenario is repeated for up to 20 times. Once these runs are complete, the data is transferred to the data analysis system and the model, or wind tunnel conditions are changed and the whole process repeats. While the next test is running, the data from the previous test is analyzed.

The I/O requirements include 96 thermocouples, 24 bridge channels and IRIGB Time code. Half of the thermocouple and bridge channels have a sampling rate of 1000 Hz. The most important channels are the 40 thermocouples in the inlet rake. The other channels scan at a sampling rate of 20 Hz.

The functionality of our DAQ Director software is ideal for this application, since it is prepackaged data acquisition software that operates under Windows NT and uses LabVIEW for the operator interface and for data analysis.

The primary KineticSystems products used in this application are:

• AC10 DAQ Director Data Acquisition Software
• V120 FOXI VXI Slot-0 Controller with fiber optic interface
• V122 FOXI PCI Host Adapter which provides the host computer interface for the V120
• V195 13-Slot, C-Size, VXIbus Mainframe
• V213 32 or 64-channel Scanning ADC with 2-pole passive filters
• V208 16-bit, 100,000 Sample/sec ADC host for the V246 and V253 modules
• V246 8-channel Bridge Signal Conditioner with 6-pole programmable filters
• V253 16-channel, Programmable Gain/Analog Filter with 6-pole active filters
• V387 128-channel Digital Input/Output

This application note is provided "as is" without any warranties of any kind, either expressed or implied, including but not limited to the implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. KineticSystems Company, LLC further does not warrant the accuracy and completeness of the material contained herein. KineticSystems Company, LLC may make changes to this material, or to the products described in it, at any time without notice.

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