Microstar Releases Rotating Machinery Analysis Module

By DE Editors

Microstar Laboratories has released a Rotating Machinery Analysis module, with software tools to facilitate mixed time measurements and rotation measurements of rotating machinery. The advanced processing operates in the embedded environment of the xDAP family of Data Acquisition Processor systems. This software enables applications to use the features of time-based sampling and encoder-based sampling, or both at the same time. Calculations are performed in real-time, so data arrive fully processed from the xDAP system and ready to log, display, or use immediately.

Monitoring rotating machinery requires a rotary encoder device that electronically indicates the incremental passage of equal angles of rotation. Conventional measurement methods use these encoder signals to "slave" the data sampling, forcing it to occur at step edges in the encoder signal. Ordinary time-based sampling does not suffer from these restrictions, but there is no way to know explicitly the samples that correspond to specific positions in a rotation cycle.

To use the best features of both approaches, the Rotating Equipment Analysis Module processes data captured by a fixed-rate, high-resolution sampling clock with software processing operating at continuously-varying rates aligned to pulses from the encoder device. The processing uses DSP technology based on classical sampling theory, even though the company says these techniques are relatively underutilized for test and measurement applications.

Observe and record instantaneous speed at each index pulse position. At these locations, users can trigger the capture of a block of encoder-based data, and also trigger the capture of a block of fixed-time data. They are not restricted to the resolution of the encoder device, so for example, customers could use a 2048 point FFT analysis even if their encoder hardware resolves only 360 sample points per rotation.

An xDAP Data Acquisition Processor device from Microstar provides the operating environment to support the Rotating Machinery Analysis Module. The xDAP 7420 can support continuous operation at up to 1 million 16-bit samples per second per channel on 8 channels simultaneously. It can also be configured to measure more channels, such as 16 total channels measured at up to 500K samples per second per channel.

For more information, visit Microstar Laboratories.

  Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company's website.