Endurance Testing

During development testing of equipment such as rotating machinery, it is often necessary to run performance or endurance testing, often lasting 150 hours or more. For situations like this, it is highly beneficial to be able to record data continuously.

Traditional dynamic acquisition, using one-inch analogue tapes, and more recently Sony SIR recorders, needed breaks in the acquisition in order to swap tapes over. Even today, many disk-based recording systems require interruptions in data capture, to allow disks to be swapped over.

HGL's dynamic acquisition technology has been designed from the beginning to allow continuous gap-free acquisition of data, provided that some form of storage is available for automatic archiving of files. This is achieved by treating each continuous recording as a set of files, each with its own start and end time. Due to the multi-threaded nature of the acquisition software, switching from one file to the next poses no risk of loss of data.

HGL's database management software ensures that each recording appears as one continuous unbroken, gap-free item when viewed or analysed. During acquisition, however, as each raw file is closed, it becomes available for automatic archive to removable disk or via Ethernet to a Hercules archiving system. This ensures that there is always enough disk space on the acquisition primary storage area to record more data.