Data acquisition system for collision tests in automotive industry

This paper is focused on the design and implementation of a reliable data acquisition system that is intended to be used in automobile collision testing. In our implementation the proposed system receive the input signals from three types of sensors: accelerometers, displacement sensors and angular velocity sensors. The system is composed by a conditioning unit and a multichannel data acquisition board (NI 6251) connected to a computer through USB interface. The conditioning circuit of the system ensures the variable amplification, filtering and sample and hold function for the signals received from the sensors. The sampling frequency used in the system is 40 kHz, simultaneously for all three input channels. Also, for graphical displaying and further processing of measured data, a proprietary software application was developed in LabVIEW programming environment. By using a compact realization of the conditioning unit, a high speed data acquisition board and an attractive graphical interface is obtained a flexible system for accurate collision test in automotive industry. The system can be extended very easy by increasing the number of attached sensors and minor changes in the software application.