Hawk PC Overview

Overview

Acquire hundreds of analogue or digital channels, with simultaneous sampling across all channels, and analyse the results within seconds - all on a single compact data acquisition system. A Hawk system can deliver that solution today.
The Hawk system provides a range of modular multi-channel data acquisition and processing units. The Hawk range is able to acquire data from a wide range of analogue and digital sources.
The built-in data analysis unit is capable of reducing the acquired data into meaningful results in either the time or frequency domains.
Applications
The Hawk has many applications and is particularly appropriate for those requiring high channel count, long duration, high resolution dynamic data capture at fixed test locations.
  • Medium/Large scale gas/steam turbine and compressor development test facilities
  • Vibration analysis systems for reciprocating engines
  • Structural Vibration monitoring
  • Noise monitoring and analysis
  • Very high-speed data logging (50 MBytes / second and above
  • Seismic data capture and analysis 

Data Acquisition

The Hawk range of products provide the means to acquire data from analogue and digital signals. Data capture can be performed live or from a wide range of pre-recorded media. All HGL Data Acquisition products utilize industry standard COTS hardware, integrated with the HGL High Performance Acquisition Engine. This allows data throughput in excess of 50 MBytes per second to be captured continuously, without data loss and with advances in PC processing power, the performance goes up and up.

Analogue Inputs

HGL utilizes data acquisition hardware from well known industrial partners. The use of COTS hardware allows us to provide a very wide range of input modules, a summary of which is provided below.

  • 0-20 MHz Bandwidth variety of modules
  • 1-64 channels per unit
  • 12-24 bit digestion
  • <0.01% THD
  • >90 dB SNR (for 16-bit and above digitization)

Digital Inputs

The Hawk can optionally support a wide range of digital inputs from tape media, such as the Sony SIR1000/1000W series and the Racal Heim. It can also interface with a wide range of telemetry equipment, through dedicated digital hardware interfaces and with file based data, through formats such as UFF and CSV.

Multiple Unit Acquisition 

Multiple Hawk units can be connected together providing Channel counts in excess of 1024, with guaranteed synchronous sample points (to within 90 ns) across all channels. The modularity of the Hawk systems enables customers to create flexible mobile data acquisition systems which can be rearranged to suit individual test scenarios, providing an efficient, cost-effective test facility.
Users can change viewing parameters interactively including the bandwidth of the FFT's and Campbell plots. This facility allows investigation of features within a 1.6 kHz bandwidth anywhere within the acquisition bandwidth even when sampling at 200 kHz.
The Hawk range provides sophisticated safety monitoring features including:
  • 32 Features per channel
  • Choice of Fixed Frequency, Engine Orders, Quadratic Mode, or Unknown feature types
  • Specifications of variable amplitudes limits dependent on frequency

Alarms and warnings raised by the safety monitoring can be presented to users in a number of ways from visible and audible alarms on the real-time monitoring screens through to automatic triggering of data segment acquisition, to ensure that the exceedances are captured for later analysis.

The Hawk also provides a long term chart recorder function which generates a continuous chart output of peak-hold or envelope data for every channel, together with tacho information. After acquisition has been completed, analysis can view the chart recorder output, mark-up segments of interest and submit them for more in depth analysis.