Tire Tread Measurement with 2D Laser
Tire Tread Measurement with 2D Laser Automotive Tire Tread Measurement with 2D Laser Depth Why Accurate Tire Tread Measurement Matters To maximize safety and tire longevity, modern tire manufacturers are adopting 100% tire inspection systems that include tread depth measurement, defect detection, and pattern recognition. Inadequate tire tread depth can lead to reduced traction, poor braking, and potential tire failure. Surface anomalies like blistering, bubbles, or belt overlap may cause runout, road noise, or even catastrophic failure. With consumer expectations rising and regulatory standards tightening, tire OEMs and testing labs need precise, [...]
Gap Monitor Keeps Wind Turbines Running
Gap Monitor Keeps Wind Turbines Running Power Generation Wind Turbine Gap Monitoring Distance, Gap, Tolerance Description [Application Note 21218] Wind turbine production has been steadily increasing to meet growing demand for renewable energy. As power outputs and the number of installations climb, maintenance becomes ever more critical. Operators want to minimize downtime and protect against catastrophic failure. The ability to predict when maintenance will be required can go a long way to ensure these goals are met. Gap monitoring sensors from MTI Instruments help wind turbine operators predict impending [...]
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 [...]
Portable Vibration/Balancing System Simplifies Jet Engine Testing
Portable Vibration/Balancing System Simplifies Jet Engine Testing Aviation/Aerospace, Power Generation Jet Engine Testing Amplitude Description [Application Note 32818-2] Overall gas turbine engine vibration may be considered the summation of vibration contributions from various moving parts within the engine. The ability to correlate vibration magnitude with specific moving parts helps engineers ascertain and correct the sources of vibration. Problem Commercial and military aviation rely on vibration analysis and trim balancing to establish such correlations. Vibration analysis detects discrepancies in rotational machine dynamics; trim balancing is used to reduce vibration amplitudes of [...]
Push-Pull Capacitance Sensor Measures Ungrounded Targets
Push-Pull Capacitance Sensor Measures Ungrounded Targets Solar, Semiconductor Measurement of Ungrounded Targets Thickness, Metrology Description [Application Note 50318] Today’s semiconductor and solar industries drive the demand for thinner wafers to conserve silicon and fulfill new IC applications. To meet this demand, wafer fabricators seek greater dimensional control of their silicon products. Non-contacting capacitance sensors offer the precision, accuracy, and speed needed to measure flatness, thickness variation, and other critical dimensions. Typically, the standard capacitance sensor acts as one plate of a classical two-plate capacitive gap measurement scenario. The grounded target [...]
Windshield Manufacturing
Windshield Manufacturing Automotive Windshield Manufacturing Tolerances Description In order to maintain proper profile and thickness within a glass furnace the extrusion plate spacing must be maintained at a predetermined gap. Unfortunately, due to process changes and temperature swings this gap can fluctuate significantly in short periods of time. This variation causes the glass thickness to change (check out our glass thickness measurement devices to accurately measure thickness), producing uneven temperature gradients and creating potentially weak glass panels. To control this critical parameter the manufacturing process requires automated active feedback control [...]
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 [...]
Cargo Container Position
Transportation Cargo Container Position Distance Description
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 [...]
Road Surface Quality
Road Surface Quality Transportation Road Surface Quality Surface Description Introduction Various Departments of Transportation (DOTs), both nationally and internationally, are developing and incorporating automated road quality inspection equipment. “It is well known that the characteristics of the road surface, especially for the surface layer, are essential to satisfy some primary requests, such as user safety and noise pollution. Road performances are being evaluated and classified by the adoption of certain parameters that affect various characteristics of the road, one of which is the surface texture; it is strictly related also [...]