A future vision of data acquisition: distributed sensing, processing, and health monitoring

This paper presents a vision for a highly enhanced data acquisition and health monitoring system at NASA SSC rocket engine test facility. This vision includes the use of advanced processing capabilities, in conjunction with highly autonomous distributed sensing and intelligence, to monitor and evaluate the health of data in the context of it's associated process. This method is expected to significantly reduce data acquisition costs and improve system reliability and accountability. A universal signal conditioning amplifier (USCA) based system is being evaluated for adaptation to the SSC testing infrastructure. The USCA architecture offers many advantages including flexible and auto-configuring data acquisition with improved calibration and verifiability. Possible enhancements at SSC may include multiplexing the distributed USCAs to reduce per channel costs, and the use of IEEE-485 to Allen-Bradley ControlNet gateways for interfacing with the resident control system.