GaGe Whitepaper: Ground-Breaking Lightning Study Uses GaGe Razor Express High-Speed Digitizer
Ground-Breaking Lightning Study Uses GaGe Razor Express High-Speed Digitizer By Gerald Allgaier, GaGe (a Vitrek brand) Introduction Razor Express digitizer is an integral part of VHF broadband interferometer designed to investigate high-energy radiation from lightning strikes and multi-stroke positive cloud-to-ground flashes. A doctoral dissertation published in 2022 by Michelle Urbani, a PhD candidate at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya BarcelonaTech describes the development of a VHF broadband interferometer to investigate and better understand unsolved lightning phenomena [1]. Very high frequency (VHF) is the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) designation for radio [...]
Ultrasonic Tissue Characterization
Ultrasonic Tissue Characterization Customer Case This customer's application is Ultrasonic Tissue Characterization. Their ultrasonic sensors transmit 16 signals. The customer's requirement is to capture 512 points on the 16 channels, average them together, and then store the data in a buffer, with the system running continuously. They would like to be able to update the average buffer and recapture data as fast as possible. They would then like to log the data to disk or process the data and display an image on the screen. Since the signals coming in from their ultrasonic sensors are very weak, the customer [...]
Digitizing Ultrasonic Signals
Digitizing Ultrasonic Signals Customer Case The customer has an ultrasonic signal that he wants to digitize with either 8 or 12-bit resolution. The sampling rate required for this application is a minimum of 16 MSPS (20 MSPS is acceptable). Finally, the data must be acquired for a full 10 seconds. The data is not coming in continuously: it is arriving in bursts one millisecond apart (PRF = 1 KHz). For each trigger the customer wants to capture approximately 200 us of data. Once this data is acquired, the customer wants it saved to the hard drive as a standard [...]
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 [...]
Industrial
Industrial The following example case studies demonstrate how GaGe products and services have been successfully applied in various data acquisition industrial applications. We encourage you to contact us and discuss your application in more detail with our engineering team. GaGe can provide tailored custom hardware and software solutions to meet specific application requirements. Industrial Avionics Bus Monitoring Gas Turbine Monitoring Plasma Coating of Airplane Parts Monitoring Critical Variables Nuclear Reactor Cooling Liquid Flow Measurements Pulsed Electric Field Food Processing Galvannealing Phosphor Thermometry Airborne Communications Signal Monitoring Non-Destructive Testing (NDT) NDT for Steel Manufacturing NDT of [...]
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 [...]