A new data acquisition system for high speed pressure scanners

In recent years significant effort has been expended by the relevant systems and instrumentation engineers at the Aircraft Research Association to produce new and novel instrumentation/control systems in order to meet customer demands for higher productivity, reduced time-scales and increased flexibility. One such development has been the design, development and manufacture of a new generation system for the acquisition and monitoring of data from high speed pressure scanners. The paper details the reasons why the ARA decided to replace its existing commercially available data acquisition system with an alternative in-house design. The advantages that are being seen through the use of the new system are expanded on and the design philosophy explained. The design of the new data acquisition system for pressures recorded by high speed electronic scanners has achieved all its objectives and is easily reproducible at low cost. Several such systems are now in general usage in the various facilities owned by the ARA and others are planned. One major advantage of the in-house design being that future software modifications can easily be made in order to meet changing customer needs.