EC375-Measurements and Instrumentation

DATA ACQUISITION SYSTEMS

(With special reference to Analog, Digital, Single-Channel & Multi-channel DAS)

Assignment EC375-Measurements and Instrumentation

Name: Mathivanan.D Roll no.:20073327 ECE-SS (5/8)

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DATA ACQUISITION SYSTEMS

In computer data processing, data acquisition is the sampling of real world physical conditions and conversion of the resulting samples into digital numeric values that can be manipulated by a computer. Sometimes abbreviated DAQ, data acquisition typically involves the conversion of analog signals and waveforms into digital values and processing the values to obtain desired information. The components of data acquisition systems include:

1.) Sensors that convert physical parameters to electrical signals. 2.) Signal conditioning circuitry to coerce sensor signals into a form that can be converted to digital values. 3.) Analog-to-digital converters, which convert conditioned sensor signals to digital values.
Depending on the application, acquired data may be displayed, analyzed, or recorded, or some combination thereof. Data acquisition applications may be controlled by commercial DAQ software or by custom programs developed using various general purpose programming languages such as BASIC or C. Specialized programming languages used for data acquisition include EPICS for building large scale data acquisition systems, Lab VIEW, which offers a graphical programming environment, and MATLAB which provides graphical tools and libraries for data acquisition and analysis. Data acquisition systems, as the name implies, are products and/or processes used to collect information to document or analyze some phenomenon. In the simplest form, a technician logging the temperature of an oven on a piece of paper is performing data acquisition. As technology has progressed, this type of process has been simplified and made more accurate, versatile, and reliable through electronic equipment. Equipment ranges from simple recorders to sophisticated computer systems. Data acquisition products serve as a focal point in a system, tying together a wide variety of products, such as sensors that indicate temperature, flow, level, or pressure.

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Analog Data Acquisition:

Analog Data acquisition begins with the physical phenomenon or physical property to be measured. Examples of this include temperature, light intensity, gas pressure, fluid flow, and force. Regardless of the type of physical property to be measured, the physical state that is to be measured must first be transformed into a unified form that can be sampled by a data acquisition system. The task of performing such transformations falls on devices called sensors. A sensor, which is a type of transducer, is a device that converts a physical property into a corresponding electrical signal (e.g., a voltage or current) or, in many cases, into a corresponding electrical characteristic (e.g., resistance or capacitance) that can easily be converted to electrical signal. The ability of a data acquisition system to measure differing properties depends on having sensors that are suited to detect the various properties to be measured. There are specific sensors for many different applications. DAQ systems also employ various signal conditioning techniques to adequately modify various different electrical signals into voltage that can then be digitized using Analog-todigital converters (ADCs).

Digital Data acquisition:

Signals may be digital (also called logic signals sometimes) or analog depending on the transducer used. Signal conditioning may be necessary if the signal from the transducer is not suitable for the DAQ hardware to be used. The signal may be amplified or deamplified, or may require filtering, or a lock-in amplifier is included to perform demodulation. Various other examples of signal conditioning might be bridge completion, providing current or voltage excitation to the sensor, isolation, linearization, etc. Analog signals tolerate almost no cross talk and so are converted to digital data, before coming close to a PC or before travelling along long cables. For analog data to have a high signal to noise ratio, the signal needs to be very high, and sending +-10 Volts along a fast signal path with a 50 Ohm termination requires powerful drivers. With a slightly mismatched or no termination at all, the voltage

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along the cable rings multiple time until it is settled in the needed precision. Digital data can have +-0.5 Volt. The same is true for DACs. Also digital data can be sent over glass fiber for high voltage isolation or by means of Manchester encoding or similar through RF-couplers, which prevent net hum.

DAQ hardware:
DAQ hardware is what usually interfaces between the signal and a PC. It could be in the form of modules that can be connected to the computer's ports (parallel, serial, USB, etc...) or cards connected to slots (PCI, ISA, PCI-E, etc...) in the mother board. Usually the space on the back of a PCI card is too small for all the connections needed, so an external breakout box is required. The cable between this Box and the PC is expensive due to the many wires, the required shielding, and because it is exotic. DAQ-cards often contain multiple components (multiplexer, ADC, DAC, TTL-IO, high speed timers, RAM). These are accessible via a bus by a micro controller, which can run small programs. The controller is more flexible than a hard wired logic, yet cheaper than a CPU so that it is alright to block it with simple polling loops. For example: Waiting for a trigger, starting the ADC, looking up the time, waiting for the ADC to finish, move value to RAM, switch multiplexer, get TTL input, let DAC proceed with voltage ramp. As 16 bit ADCs, DACs, OpAmps and sample and holds with equal precision as of 2007 only run at 1 MHz, even low cost digital controllers like the AVR32 have about 100 clock cycles for bookkeeping in between. Reconfigurable computing may deliver high speed for digital signals. Digital signal processors spend a lot of silicon on arithmetic and allow tight control loops or filters. The fixed connection with the PC allows for comfortable compilation and debugging. Using an external housing a modular design with slots in a bus can grow with the needs of the user. High speed binary data needs special purpose hardware called Time to digital converter and high speed 8 bit ADCs called oscilloscopes, which are typically not connected to DAQ hardware, but directly to the PC. Also notable is that not all DAQ hardware has to run permanently connected to a PC, for example intelligent stand-alone loggers and controllers, which can be operated from a PC, yet they can operate completely independent of the PC.

DAQ software:

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DAQ software is needed in order for the DAQ Hardware to work with a PC. This can come in at least three flavours: applications that register directly from the hardware, low-level software driver to allow developing higher level applications to register data coming from the hardware and off-the-shelf applications Driver software that usually comes with the DAQ hardware or from other vendors, allows the operating system to recognize the DAQ hardware and programs to access the signals being read by the DAQ hardware. A good driver offers high and low level access. So one would start out with the high level solutions offered and improves down to assembly instructions in time critical or exotic applications. Off-the-shelf applications include interface for programming means to log, analyze and display the acquired data. Examples of this kind of software are MATLAB and Lab VIEW, both providing a high level graphical programming language.

Basic structure of DAS Single Channel Data Acquisition System: Pipe Monitor or Pipe Inspection Gauge (PIG) is a battery operated instrument complete with 1" x 1" thick or 2" x 2" NaI (Tl) detector, Voltage Divider and Preamplifier for the detector. Entire equipment is housed in a watertight Stainless Steel container. The SS container is strong enough to withstand the tumbling and shocks inside the pipeline while travelling from one end to the other. Pipe Monitor works on 8 C type Dura cells. Typical battery life is more than 30 hours. This enables user to use the PIG without changing the batteries even after one or two experiments. PIG is a micro controller based single channel data acquisition system. It has front end electronics compatible to NaI (Tl) detector. The incident radiation

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produces the sharp pulses as output of PMT. These pulses are shaped to TTL output for counting. Micro controller based counter counts these pulses and stores them in the Flash Card memory. The use of Flash Card reduces the down loading time of the data when the PIG is retrieved after the pipe inspection. Initialisations of Flash Card, setting of counting time are accomplished by the software program. This program checks the integrity of the Flash Card for writing data. Once the time parameter is set, PIG is ready to acquire the counts data for a period over 20 hours. Reading of Flash Card is done with use of another Windows based program 'PIG Reader'. Multi-channel Data Acquisition System: Multi-channel DAS include target detections, target imaging, proud and buried target detections and classifications using structural clues. To determine the limitations that a fluctuating environment places on these target detection methods, a data acquisition system was developed. The data acquisition system consists of multi-channel, high-speed A/Ds with remote, variable gain control, and FPGA technology. Each A/D is synchronously sampled at a rate of 1 MHz and using timedivision multiplexing techniques, is sent down an optical fiber at 1.3 Gbps. The sampled data is then separated back to its original channel and recovered back to an analog signal along with the original clock. Precision filters and high speed transient recorders utilizing fast CAMAC crate controllers are then employed to sample, simultaneously, all data channels with sample rates up to 3Msps. Acoustic and environmental real-time software were developed using National Instruments Lab view to generate the CW source signals that went from 10 kHz to 200 kHz, monitor acquired data, and control sample and repetition rates.

Multi Channel DAS

Some common data acquisition terms are shown below:

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Analog-to-digital converter (ADC): An electronic device that converts analog signals to an equivalent digital form. The analog-to-digital converter is the heart of most data acquisition systems. Digital-to-Analog Converter (D/A): An electronic component found in many data acquisition devices that produce an analog output signal. Digital Input/output (DIO): Refers to a type of data acquisition signal. Digital I/O is discrete signals which are either one of two states. These states may be on/off, high/low, 1/0, etc. Digital I/O is also referred to as binary I/O.

Differential Input: Refers to the way a signal is wired to a data acquisition device. Differential inputs have a unique high and unique low connection for each channel. Data acquisition devices have either single-ended or differential inputs, many devices support both configurations. General Purpose Interface Bus (GPIB): Synonymous with HPIB (for Hewlett-Packard), the standard bus used for controlling electronic instruments with a computer. Also called IEEE 488 in reference to defining ANSI/IEEE standards. Resolution: The smallest signal increment that can be detected by a data acquisition system. Resolution can be expressed in bits, in proportions, or in percent of full scale. For example, a system has 12-bit resolution, one part in 4,096 resolutions, and 0.0244 percent of full scale. RS232: A standard for serial communications found in many data acquisition systems. RS232 is the most common serial communication, however, it is somewhat

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limited in that it only supports communication to one device connected to the bus at a time and it only supports transmission distances up to 50 feet. RS485: A standard for serial communications found in many data acquisition systems. RS485 is not as popular as RS232, however, it is more flexible in that it supports communication to more than one device on the bus at a time and supports transmission distances of approximately 5,000 feet. Sample Rate: The speed at which a data acquisition system collects data. The speed is normally expressed in samples per second. For multi-channel data acquisition devices the sample rate is typically given as the speed of the analog-to-digital converter (A/D). To obtain individual channel sample rate, you need to divide the speed of the A/D by the number of channels being sampled.

Single-ended Input (SE): Refers to the way a signal is wired to a data acquisition device. In single-ended wiring, each analog input has a unique high connection but all channels share a common ground connection. Data acquisition devices have either single-ended or differential inputs. Many support both configurations.

General Data Acquisition Framework

Types of Data Acquisition Systems: Wireless Data Acquisition Systems:

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Wireless data acquisition systems can eliminate costly and time consuming field wiring of process sensors. These systems consist of one or more wireless transmitters sending data back to a wireless receiver connected to a remote computer. Wireless transmitters are available for ambient temperature and relative humidity, thermocouples, RTDs, pulse output sensors, 4 to 20 mA transmitters and voltage output transducers. Receivers can be connected to the USB or Ethernet port on the PC.

Serial Communication Data Acquisition Systems: Serial communication data acquisition systems are a good choice when the measurement needs to be made at a location which is distant from the computer. There are several different communication standards, RS232 is the most common but only supports transmission distances up to 50 feet. RS485 is superior to RS485 and supports transmission distances to 5,000 feet. USB Data Acquisition Systems: The Universal Serial Bus (USB) is a new standard for connecting PCs to peripheral devices such as printers, monitors, modems and data acquisition devices. USB offers several advantages over conventional serial and parallel connections, including higher bandwidth (up to 12 Mbits/s) and the ability to provide power to the peripheral device. USB is ideal for data acquisition applications. Since USB connections supply power, only one cable is required to link the data acquisition device to the PC, which most likely has at least one USB port. Data Acquisition Plug-in Boards: Computer data acquisition boards plug directly into the computer bus. Advantages of using boards are speed (because they are connected directly to the bus) and cost (because the overhead of packaging and power is provided by the computer). Boards offered are primarily for IBM PC and compatible computers. Features provided by the cards can vary due to number and type of inputs (voltage, thermocouple, on/off), outputs, speed and other functions provided. Each board installed in the computer is addressed at a unique Input/output map location. The I/O map in the computer provides the address locations the processor uses to gain access to the specific device as required by its program.

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