ATLAS - A small, light weight, time-synchronized wind-turbine data acquisition system
Dale E. Berg, Perry Robertson, Jose R. Zayas · 37th Aerospace Sciences Meeting and Exhibit · 1999
Wind energy researchers at Sandia National Laboratories have developed a small, light weight, time-synchronized, robust data acquisition system to acquire long-term time-series data on a wind turbine rotor. A commercial data acquisition module is utilized to acquire data simultaneously from multiple strain-gauge, analog, and digital channels. Acquisition of rotor data at precisely the same times as acquisition of ground data is ensured by slaving the acquisition clocks on the rotor-based data unit and ground-based units to the Global Positioning Satellite (GPS) system with commercial GPS receiver units and custom-built and programmed programmable logic devices. The acquisition clocks will remain synchronized within two microseconds indefinitely. Field tests have confirmed that synchronization can be maintained at rotation rates in excess of 350 rpm. Commercial spreadspectrum radio modems are used to transfer the rotor data to a ground-based computer concurrently with data acquisition, permitting continuous acquisition of data over a period of several hours, days or even weeks. KEY WORDS * This work was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy under contracts DE-AC04-94AL85000 and DE-AC36-83CH10093. Sandia is a multiprogram laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a Lockheed Martin company, for the U.S. Department of Energy. + Principal Member of Technical Staff, AIAA Associate Fellow # Principal Member of Technical Staff Student Intern This paper is declared a work of the U.S. Government and is not subject to copyright protection in the United States. Time synchronization, data acquisition, light weight, GPS application, spread-spectrum modem