Landing Gear Strain Measurement App Note #015

© 2007 United Electronic Industries, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

 Landing Gear Strain Measurement — Application:
A large NASA funded research facility needed a way
to test the strength and stability of a landing “gear”
designed for use in a future Mars landing vehicle. A pro-
totype of the landing gear was developed and was to be
subject to “drop” tests designed to simulate the stress pro-
file of an actual landing.
The engineers challenge was to find a system that could
sample 90 strain gage inputs (simultaneously) as well as
acquire data from accelerometers, rate gyros and quadra-
ture encoders and was: 1) light enough to not compromise
the simulated crafts weight or balance, 2) rugged enough
to survive 30 g landing forces and 3) could be wired to a
host computer with wires light and flexible enough wires
not to impact the drop dyanamics.
The DNA-PPC8 PowerDNA cube with its 6 I/O slots fit
the bill perfectly. Using the 25-channel DNA-AI-225 all
96 analog input channels could be handled with four I/O
boards, leaving one slot for the DNA-CT-601 counter board
© 2007 United Electronic Industries, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
for quadrature encoder inputs and on free slot. This means
the entire DAQ system fit in a single 4” x 4” x 5.8” cube
weighing under four pounds. The PowerDNA Cube’s 50 g
shock and 5 g vibration specifications also were up to the
task. Finally, the Cube’s wide 9-36 VDC power requirement
meant the system could draw power from batteries already
on the simulator, leaving only a simple Ethernet cable re-
quired to connect the DAQ system to the host PC.
The application was developed in LabVIEW RT, and run on
standard desktop computer. The PowerDNA products used
in the system include:
Product Description / Usage
DNA-PPC8 6 slot, PowerDNA Cube
DNA-AI-225 25-channel, 24-bit simultaneously sampling A/D cards
used to monitor the strain, accelerometer and rate Gyro
channels
DNA-CT-601 8-channel counter timer boards are used as counters to
monitor the quadrature encoder input signals.
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 Landing Gear Strain Measurement — UEI Products Used:
DNA-PPC8
The PowerDNA® (Distributed Networked Automa-
tion) Cube is a compact, rugged, Ethernet based DAQ
interface. Its flexibility allows you to configure one or
more cubes to match the specific I/O requirements of
your application. The PowerDNA Cube is ideally suited
for a wide variety of industrial, aerospace and labora-
tory data acquisition and control applications.
© 2007 United Electronic Industries, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
DNA-AI-225
True 24-bit resolution makes DNA-AI-225 offers
ultra-high resolution going into the microvolt level
across the full input range, with one converter per
channel with simultaneous sampling across all 25 in-
dependent ADCs and outstanding linearity. Long-term
gain and offset drifts, as well as drift vs. temperature
ratio, make it useful in a wide range of applications.
DNA-CT-601
The DNA-CT-601 is a general-purpose counter/timer
layer that provides eight independent 32-bit channels,
each one having overvoltage protection and optoisola-
tion. They perform up/down counting in a number of
flexible modes. The counters also will generate PWM
outputs or monitor Quadrature encoder inputs.
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© 2007 United Electronic Industries, Inc.