High Performance Data Acquisition Systems
Mr. Scott Walton, US Army Aberdeen Test Center

Dr. Lee Francis, US Army Aberdeen Test Center

Mr. Gary Uhland, US Army Aberdeen Test Center

Mr. Dustin Houseman, US Army Aberdeen Test Center
Mr. Corey Himes, US Army Aberdeen Test Center

Abstract:
Aberdeen Test Center (ATC) is responsible for acquiring, processing and analyzing ballistic data generated from interior, exterior and survivability/lethality tests performed during the test and evaluation process.  Currently ATC operates 17 data acquisition facilities to support these measurements.  ATC is preparing to field its third generation of automated data acquisition instrumentation. This paper describes the latest system that ATC will put to use to improve the quality and productivity of this core business area.  The primary components in the system are a signal conditioner, a digitizer, built in test equipment and an integrated software application.  From a hardware stand point, the new system was designed with the following goals: 1) improved dynamic range, 2) large memory, 3) non-volatile memory backup, 4) temperature capability and 5) high speed timing capability.  The first three goals were to support survivability/lethality evaluations where one of a kind testing mandates no lost data (no over range/no under range).  The last two goals were to reduce the number of instruments and personnel required to support tests.  In addition, the system was required to comply with the ATC internal instrumentation standard called VISION (Versatile Information System Integrated ON-line) which influenced the interfacing and programming language.  The signal conditioner (manufactured by Precision Filters, Inc) supports voltage, strain, charge, IEPE and thermocouple inputs.  The non-thermocouple inputs support gains from 1 to 10,000 with a bandwidth of 200kHz and 6th order Bessel filtering.  The digitizer (manufactured by BittWare, Inc) provides up to 2 million samples per second (MSps) at 16 bits resolution or up to 20MSps at 12 bits with 32 million samples of memory per channel.  A wide variety of trigger modes are supported including internal, external, master/slave and software.  The ATC console software supports calibration, diagnostics, setup, operation (including real-time temperature viewing) and analysis. A typical system consists of 32 channels with a maximum of 128 channels supported.  It will be shown that the new system has met its design goals.

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