Spider-80Ti Temperature Measurement Video

Watch the new Spider-80Ti video produced by Aakash Umesh Mange, Application Engineer at Crystal Instruments. Narration is provided by Walter Kemphaus, Application Engineer at Crystal Instruments.

The Spider-80Ti is a front-end from the Spider-80Xi hardware platform that enables temperature measurement. Spider-80Ti supports temperature measurements from Thermocouples and RTD (Resistance Temperature Detector) sensors.

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Sine Sweep in High Frequency Range

A typical vibration test often requires running the test up to 2000 Hz or beyond. This is a tremendous challenge because the resonant and anti-resonant frequencies are often only a few hundred Hz. This article analyzes the obstacles to running a sine test over a high frequency range, including the dynamic characteristics of the Unit Under Test (UUT) and fixtures, the control dynamic range of the vibration controllers, and the sensor mounting locations. Several strategies and recommendations are then discussed with results.

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Structural measurements on infrastructure can ensure future safety and avert potential disasters.

Structural measurements on infrastructure are growing in demand given the aging buildings, bridges, and dams that populate countries around the world. Structural measurements are not the only measurements needed for aging infrastructure, but they do play a role. In the structural measurement category, Crystal Instruments offers products to measure and analyze data for large structure measurements like the measurements done on the Vieux Emosson Gravity Dam.

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Virgin Orbit Performs Vibration Testing with Crystal Instruments Spider-80X Vibration Control System

On January 17, 2021, Virgin Orbit successfully reached orbit with LauncherOne and deployed 10 CubeSats into Low Earth Orbit for NASA. Prior to the launch, the engineers at Virgin Orbit performed extensive vibration testing using Crystal Instruments vibration controllers with hundreds of channels. A Virgin Orbit dynamics engineer confirmed that “the Spider controllers played an important role in our successful launch,”

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Watch how our products are designed and made.

Founded in 1996, Crystal Instruments designs and manufactures instrumentation products for machine vibration monitoring, dynamic measurement, and environmental testing. The products are developed in Silicon Valley and our modern lab in North Carolina. Crystal Instruments products are thoroughly tested on a variety of vibration shakers and environmental chambers in our lab during the design phase to meet the extreme requirements of military and aerospace applications.

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Which shaker excitation is best? Is there any difference?

Which shaker excitation is best? Is there any difference? Well ... that's a good question. Let's talk about the different techniques.

Let's discuss the most commonly used excitation techniques for modal analysis today. These are random, burst random, sine chirp and digital stepped sine. But before we discuss the excitation techniques themselves, there are a few basics that we need to discuss first. Let's try to categorize the different techniques and explain when to use which technique. First of all, let's break up the excitations into deterministic and non-deterministic (or random) excitations.

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Dr. Pete Avitabile
Alias Rejection and Alias-free Bandwidth

There are two steps for converting an analog signal into a digital signal – quantization in time (sampling) and quantization of amplitude. Any signal that goes through the sampling process is subject to the effect of aliasing. The common use of the word ‘alias’ is used to describe a false name or identity, which is similar to how the term is used in signal processing.

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If you don’t excite a structure at its natural frequency, then how can you know what it is? This is an important item to discuss.

Well, this is an area where I find people often get confused. Many times I hear people say that they have to tweak and tune the excitation frequency so that they get the excitation right at the natural frequency otherwise the frequency will not be identified properly. I also hear people say that the excitation method must have broadband energy at all frequencies otherwise the system will not be excited properly.

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Dr. Pete Avitabile