DATA ACQUISITION FEATURES

 

The Data Acquisition module of MIDA is designed to acquire data from very large binary files stored on hard drives or CD's by digital tape recorders.  Only limitation to the size of binary files is the size of storage medium.  Typical file sizes could be several hundred megabytes or gigabytes large.

The data acquisition module supports file browsing, snapshot time data acquisition, acquisition with tachometer and/or trigger signals in time domain with options for, on the fly, spectral conversion.  In addition, shaft speed (rpm) proportional windowing with optional conversion to angle base is supported.  RPM proportional data acquisition especially with angle base conversion while averaging through slightly changing shaft speeds is the most powerful method of obtaining leakage free data. 

Features of the user interface are

Acquisition Channel Selection:
    Allows selection of any combination of channels present in the binary file. Binary files up to 64 channels are supported.

Tachometer settings:
   The tachometer channel, signal level and the number of tach. pulses per revolution can be interactively selected. The tachometer level is displayed in the upper data window and can be controlled by the slider bar in the tachometer control group.

Trigger Settings:
   The trigger channel, level, slope and delay can be selected. The trigger level is display in the lower data window and can be controlled by the slider bar in the trigger control group. Rising and falling edge triggering is control by a push button in the same group of controls.

Data Browsing and Snapshot Acquisition:
  
Simple to use data browsing controls allow play back, fast forward, fast rewind, rewind and user specified rpm search. Three RPM search algorithms are provided for searching ascending, descending and arbitrarily changing RPM using the tachometer signal.
   The Snapshot Acquisition feature allows taking time data with user specified number of samples.  This feature is especially useful for transient data signals.

Tachometered and Triggered Acquisition:
   This capability allows data acquisition at specified shaft speeds with ascending or descending RPM tracking.  RPM tracking may be performed with or without triggering. Acquisition without tracking RPM but only triggering or continuously taking data at specified block sizes is also available. 
   Time or frequency domain acquisition modes may be selected with the following options.

  • Time domain data acquisition

    • Constant block size

    • Variable block size inversely proportional to tach. signal

    • Angle base conversion with variable block size

    • Averaging (including during angle base conversion*)

  • Frequency domain acquisition

    • Rectangular, Hanning, Hamming and Flattop windows with amplitude and energy correction factors

    • Peak or RMS amplitude scaling

    • Spectrum and Auto-spectrum averaging**
        

    *  Averaging during conversion to angle base use re-sampling of the data to achieve acquisition at constant angular rotation intervals. Even if the shaft speed may change during averaging re-sampling at constant angular intervals ensures leakage free acquisition.

    ** Spectrum and auto-spectrum averaging offer different forms of averaging. Auto-spectrum averaging is obtained by averaging auto-spectra but not by taking auto-spectrum of the averaged spectra.