320-channel system installed in France

HGL has supplied a 320-channel acquisition system for use with gas turbine development testing in Northern France. The system is operated from one control station, and provides integrated real-time signal display and warning/alarm information to 24 additional display screens. These screens are typically organised in pairs, so that each analyst watches two screens.

The analogue to digital conversion is handled using 10 Eagles which are installed, with Fylde signal conditioning amplifiers, close to the article under test to minimise cable lengths for the analogue signals. Each Eagle has a direct Gigabit Ethernet connection to its own Hawk, with large RAID disk capacity and multi-processor computing power. This computing power allows the system to provide advanced features such as integration, differentiation, and/or band-pass filtering to the data prior to display. 

The Hawkeye real-time display screens can be customised to each user's individual preferences. This customisation includes choice of layout (what type of graph should be displayed, in what part of the screen), choice of channel assignment (which channel should appear on a given graph), and choice of display options such as usage of measurement cursors.

The system is linked to a site-wide Gigabit Ethernet backbone which provides seamless transfer of data from multiple test cells to a common Hercules archiving system, also supplied by HGL.

The total channel count for dynamic data acquisition at this site, provided by HGL, is in excess of 800 channels.