Blogs
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 [...]
Measuring the Step Height Thickness of Non- Woven Conductive Films
Establishing and maintaining product quality throughout the production process is a common challenge of all manufacturers. How does an organization ensure the optimal output from their production lines, especially in real time? Key to this is strong non-destructive measurement practices that can take place at various points along the production process. The case study below is an example of how this was done at Saint-Gobain to measure the thickness and density of foam materials. They engaged with MTI's team of experts as their current direction was proving cost-prohibitive. Saint-Gobain's R&D organization, led by Dr. Mickael Boinet, found a solution [...]
Improving Performance of Gas Compressors
Improving Performance of Gas Compressors Customer Case A customer who is a manufacturer of natural gas compressors is seeking to improve the efficiency of their 12-cylinder diesel engines. These diesel engines are used to drive the gas compressors. The performance of the engines is analyzed from the position of the engines' shaft, which is detected by an optical encoder. The output from the encoder is a 12 kHz jittery clock with variable pulse width. The jitter has high frequency components and the jitter variation can go down to 0.1 microsecond and varies systematically with wear, load, fuel and other [...]
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 [...]
Wafer Backgrinding and Semiconductor Thickness Measurements GalleryWafer Backgrinding and Semiconductor Thickness Measurements
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Wafer Backgrinding and Semiconductor Thickness Measurements
Wafer backgrinding is the first step in semiconductor packaging, the process of encasing one or more discrete semiconductor devices or integrated circuits (IC) for protection. Known also as wafer thinning or wafer lapping, backgrinding reduces wafer thickness to allow stacking and high-density IC packaging. Wafer thickness also determines package height, an important consideration as smartphones, laptops, and other electronic devices become thinner. With MEMS, wafer thinning also controls the proof mass for devices such as accelerometers or the diaphragm thickness for pressure sensors. Etching the surface of the wafer produces the IC but grinding the backside is what produces [...]