Blogs
Digital Ultrasonic Array Data Capture
Digital Ultrasonic Array Data Capture Customer Case A customer possesses a commercial medical diagnostic ultrasonic system. The ultrasonic sensing head consists of an ultrasonic generator transducer and an 8' x 8' two-dimensional array of receiver transducers. The sensing head is pressed against the tissue under study and the generation transducer is periodically excited so that it emits a burst of ultrasonic energy. After each burst, the receiver array registers ultrasonic echoes reflected off tissue structures from each transducer element. In normal operation, digitized array data from each element is numerically processed and combined to construct a display image of [...]
Arbitrary Ultrasonic Generator
Arbitrary Ultrasonic Generator Customer Case Ultrasonic generation pulses must be varied to accommodate different types of ultrasonic transducers. General-purpose highly damped contact transducers are usually excited by a wideband, spike-like pulse that is provided by many common pulser/receiver units. Lightly damped transducers, used for example in high power generation, require a narrowband tone-burst excitation from a separate generator unit. Sometimes, even the same transducer will be excited differently, for instance, to study the dispersion of a material's ultrasonic attenuation or to characterize ultrasonic transducers. In order to construct a flexible ultrasonic generation unit, engineers have excited transducers with a [...]
Pipeline Testing
Pipeline Testing Customer Case The customer wants to test pipelines for corrosion and cracks. They intend to use a small robot which they can send into the pipeline. This robot's purpose is to test the pipe by ultrasound and magnetic field for cracks, corrosion and other damage. The customer is using 2 different types of transducers, one for ultrasound and one for the magnetic field. They are sending a pulse with a magnetic field generator, capturing the received signal, rotating the transducer 1/2 degree and then sending another pulse and capturing signal again. After a complete 360 degree rotation, [...]
Plasma Coating of Airplane Parts
Plasma Coating of Airplane Parts Customer Case The customer produces plasma coating for airplane parts. They need to count the number of plasma particles on these parts so that they can adjust the plasma torch to be less or more powerful in order to obtain the required thickness of plasma coating. Using a particle detector, they are able to measure temperature, speed and quantity of particles. These parameters are used as feedback to control the plasma coating process. GaGe Case Solution The customer requires a scope card that has both high-resolution and a fast sampling rate. At the time [...]
Gas Turbine Monitoring
Gas Turbine Monitoring Customer Case A customer who designs and develops turbo-machinery uses automated data-acquisition and reduction routines. The complete system can sequentially scan up to 144 pressures, 40 electrical signals, and 50 temperatures. It can also acquire and analyze dynamic pressure/vibration signals as well as the scanned steady-state data. They do precise pneumatic traversing for high-performance radial-flow stages. Using a computer-controlled data-acquisition system, the detailed internal pressures and temperatures can be acquired and processed. Laboratory data files are generated, which can be directly used to process the impeller-cover static pressure data. The data can also be automatically processed [...]
Avionics Bus Monitoring
Avionics Bus Monitoring Customer Case The requirement is to monitor anomalies on an avionics bus that controls systems aboard spacecrafts. The customer will know typical rise times, and therefore, will look for anomalous high-voltage pulses that may occur due to sunspots or cosmic rays. An A/D card with at least 12-bits of vertical resolution is required to capture anomalous glitches for characterization. The required sampling speed is 50 KHz, on two simultaneous channels that monitor two bus lines. The input signal bandwidth is typically 4 KHz. The customer would like to write his own data acquisition application programs in [...]
Nuclear Reactor Tube Testing
Nuclear Reactor Tube Testing Customer Case The customer needs to test specialized alloy tubing used to carry water within a nuclear reactor for possible damage. This tubing is located in a closed area where there is ambient radiation. Therefore, this test will be performed by a robot arm using ultrasonic non-destructive testing. They need to sample at 500 MHz on a single channel and save 2,000 samples for each acquisition at a Pulse Repeat Frequency (PRF) of 20 KHz. The ultrasonic transducer generates an ultrasound signal at 10 MHz. They must continuously capture a minimum of 500,000 records, which [...]
Radar Altimeter
Radar Altimeter Customer Case In this RADAR application the customer has pulses coming in at 1660 Hz. For every pulse they need to capture 500 samples which, at that rate, will amount to 1.7 Megs of data every second. The experiment will be running for at least a few minutes. They would then like to log all the captured data to the PC host memory. The final requirement is for the system to be on the PCI bus. By having the system on the PCI bus, the customer can stream the data directly to the PC's memory, which is [...]
Ultra High-Speed Radar
Ultra High-Speed Radar Customer Case This application requires the acquisition of very fast analog signals at relatively slow sample rates for a long period of time. In other words, the input bandwidth requirement is very high (1 GHz), but the sampling rate needs to be no more than 5 or 6 MSPS. The most important requirement is that the acquisition must go on, without any breaks, for many hours. The customer does not need very high dynamic range. In fact, a 4-bit A/D converter will be sufficient. The customer has already identified a 4-bit A/D chip from TRW which [...]
Radar Rackmount System for Large Record Lengths
Radar Rackmount System for Large Record Lengths Customer Case The customer needs to acquire data from his radar system at a sampling rate of 1.5 MSPS for two channels (I & Q). At the moment, this data must be acquired for at least 10 seconds, but the record length may increase by almost 100 times in the future. This equipment needs to be installed in a rackmounted environment, so the host computer must have rackmount capability. An integrated monitor is also important as it eliminates the need to purchase a rack-mounted monitor. Keyboard and mouse must also be rackmountable. [...]