Integrating real-time digital signal processing capability into a large research and development facility
W.W. Manges, J. T. Mallinak-Glassell, J. Ernest Breeding, Jochen Jansen, Ross Tate, R.R. Bentz · 1992
The Instrumentation and Controls Division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory recently developed and installed a large scale, real-time measurement system for the world's largest pressurized water tunnel. This water tunnel, the Large Cavitation Channel (LCC) provides a research and development facility for the study of acoustic phenomena to aid in model testing of new naval ship and submarine designs. The LCC design required the development of a near-field beamformer in addition to extending the range of real-time processing capability to frequencies unavailable at other facilities. The beamformer acquires and processes time-domain acoustic data at 9.5 MB/s from up to 45 hydrophones while. The acoustic processing software provides for the real-time analysis of acoustic data. Up to 128 facility sensors are sampled, time stamped, and stored at 600 kB/s. The system generates information for acoustic phenomena and facility measurements in real time so that the operator can make facility adjustments to control the running experiment This real-time control of facility conditions requires that the measurement system integrate facility and acoustic data for simultaneous display to the operator in engineering units via high-end workstations. A dual-host minicomputer configuration with high-end workstations connected via an Ethernet networking cluster controls and integrates measurement andmore » display subsystems. The system architecture integrates high-performance array processors, matrix switches, signal conditioning amplifiers, antialiasing filter subsystems, high-precision analog-to-digital subsystems, high-performance data disks, and support equipment The hardware and software architecture with its distributed computers and distributed real-time data base, the signal processing algorithms and architecture, and the flexible user interface for facility and measurements integration are described in this paper.« less