Full control with ADwin systems and PC

Vibration test stands are widely used in automotive and aviation industry for testing in R&D and production lines. Endurance tests as well as the automatic determination of dynamic and frequency response charateristics are typical test applications.

The equipment undergoes testing with exactly predefined position, force, speed or acceleration set point curves. Typical components e.g. are engine mountings, shock absorbers, wheel sunspensions, exhaust pipes, seats and steering parts. The excitation is measured and recorded by analog and digital sensors. At the same time, limit values are monitored.

ADwin systems simultaneously carry out open-loop and closed-loop control, waveform generation and data acquisition. The PC retrieves the measuring data for visualization and storage purposes.

Requirements for test stand control

The control of the vibration test stand (single hydraulic axis in this example) usually consists of three main tasks:

• A digital signal generator for the excitation set point curve: arbitrary periodic or transient waveforms in batch or continous mode.
• A digital hydraulic closed-loop controller for tracking the setpoint values at the motion axis of the test stand, superposition of peak and offset control and hitchless switching between position and force control mode.
• A data acquisition system for online analysis of amplitude and phase response, dynamic characteristics evaluation and limit value monitoring.

All tasks are executed on one ADwin system also for multi-axes test stands. The comfortable power reserve of ADwin easily allows sample rates up tp 50 kHz (20 μs cycle time).

Additional task with "low" sample rates - less than 1 kHz - can be processed in parallel on the same ADwin system. Typical examples are temperature and pressure monitoring or switching of valves and relays.

The advantages of the ADwin solution

ADwin is a highly flexible and cost effective solution for control of all kinds of vibration test stands. Our customers especially appreciate its operational reliability even together with a Windows PC. The fast control tasks run on a dedicated real-time processor on the ADwin system. The graphical user interface runs on the PC and can be easily designed as virtually all common software development tools have comfortable access to the ADwin system.

The factor experience

With their simple hardware architecture, ADwin systems are the first choice for the modernization even of existing vibration test stands. The experience of Jäger Messtechnik GmbH since 1988 in implentation of new and modernized test stands is an additional benefit. Far more than 100 different test stands have been build or modified on the base of an ADwin ⇔ PC solution.