Chapter 15 Using Low-Cost “Garage Band” Recording Technology for Acquiring High Resolution High-Speed Data Randall Wetherington, Gregory Sheets, Tom Karnowski, Ryan Kerekes, Michael Vann, Michael Moore, and Eva Freer Abstract The Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) has developed and tested a novel system architecture for acquiring high fidelity high-speed data. The approach uses a consumer grade audio recording device that is normally associated with “garage band” recording of music. ORNL has coupled this low-cost data acquisition hardware with computing technology running open-source software. The main advantage of this approach is per-channel cost; an instrument grade data acquisition system typically costs between $800 to $2000 per channel compared to less than $50 per channel for these consumer grade components. Three systems, each featuring four channels, have been deployed for acquiring data from geophones and the electrical supply system that supports the High Flux Isotope Reactor (HFIR) and the Radiochemical Engineering Development Center (REDC) at ORNL. Each channel samples at 96 kHz at 24-bit resolution. The deployed systems operate continuously 24/7 and produce about 4 terabytes of data per month per system. This paper provides a technical overview of this approach, its implementation, and some preliminary results from qualification testing. This work was conducted in support of the Multi-Informatics for Nuclear Operations Scenarios (MINOS). Keywords Data acquisition · Measurement · Informatics 15.1 Background and Approach The impact of digital technologies has produced profound changes in all aspects of our lives. This includes the business of making high-speed measurements. In particular, the marriage of digital and low-noise analog technologies has resulted in data acquisition solutions that provide levels of performance that were a pipe dream only a few decades ago. Even so, the cost per channel of a quality high-speed data acquisition system can be high; starting at about $1 K per channel and going much higher. Yet there are creative approaches that can get this per channel cost down especially in cases where laboratory-grade measurements are not required such as machine monitoring or signature detection. This approach works especially well for applications where persistent data recording is required (i.e., data acquisition does not stop). The approach is based on leveraging the superb performance capabilities of consumer audio recording USB adapters with the robust data management capabilities of Linux when deployed on PC-level computers. The performance and robustness that can be achieved with this approach is quite impressive. The audio adapters, which are the analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) in this approach, are available as 2, 4, 8, and more channels per USB device. These units provide 16-bit or 24-bit digital representation with overall SNR specifications in the range of 90 dB to 120 dB. The channels are synchronously sampled and multiple units can be synchronized together. The dynamic range performance is usually better than 90 dB and tonal detectability with the correct processing can be in excess of −150 dB referenced to 1 Volt peak-to-peak. The big advantage of using USB audio adapters is cost. The per-channel cost is $25 to $400 per channel. This manuscript has been authored by UT-Battelle, LLC under Contract No. DE-AC05-00OR22725 with the U.S. Department of Energy. The United States Government retains and the publisher, by accepting the article for publication, acknowledges that the United States Government retains a non-exclusive, paid-up, irrevocable, worldwide license to publish or reproduce the published form of this manuscript, or allow others to do so, for United States Government purposes. The Department of Energy will provide public access to these results of federally sponsored research in accordance with the DOE Public Access Plan (http://energy.gov/downloads/doe-public-access-plan). R. Wetherington ( ) · G. Sheets · T. Karnowski · R. Kerekes · M. Vann · M. Moore · E. Freer Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, TN, USA e-mail: randallw@ornl.gov © The Society for Experimental Mechanics, Inc. 2021 C. Walber et al. (eds.), Sensors and Instrumentation, Aircraft/Aerospace, Energy Harvesting & Dynamic Environments Testing, Volume 7, Conference Proceedings of the Society for Experimental Mechanics Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47713-4_15 175
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