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Engineering insights from the field
“Practical knowledge on measurement, monitoring, and testing — from the engineers who do the work.”
Technical articles, application notes, case studies, and white papers from the ITM team — across all three pillars.
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Testing, RLDA, rugged systems, and measurement software.
Instrumentation
Strain gauging, sensing, DAQ, harnesses, and wireless networks.
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Industrial monitoring, Edge Nodes, dashboards, and the platform.
Recent insights
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Strain Gauge Bridge Completion Modules
The most common strain gauges used to quantify the state of stress on a test specimen’s surface, are uniaxial and rosette gauges. For accurate measurements of stress and strain, these uniaxial and rosette gauges are independently connected as a Wheatstone bridge in a 3-wire quarter-bridge or half-bridge arrangement. Today, most high-end data acquisition equipment manufacturers…
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Creating XLS files from TDMS Files
Precision testing generates precision data. Acquiring, accessing, and analyzing these data files allows engineers and scientists to lower product costs, engineer time-saving solutions, and even save lives. National Instruments (NI) created the Technical Data Management Streaming (TDMS) file format for high performance data streaming and retrieval. This binary file is structured for easier sorting and…
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Accelerometers for Rotating Machinery Vibration Measurements
Choosing an accelerometer for rotating machinery vibration measurements can be a daunting task since there are so many options available. This blog outlines the characteristics you should consider when choosing a piezoelectric single axis accelerometer for general purpose vibration measurements and presents some accelerometers to consider. Characteristics of a General Purpose Accelerometer When measuring vibration…
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How Do I Collect Vibration Data with iTestSystem and a cDAQ?
Our test engineers collect vibration data on rotating machinery using four basic tools. We use a Laptop computer with iTestSystem software to stream accelerometer and rotational/speed pulse sensor data from a National Instruments cDAQ equipped with vibration and voltage input modules. The video above shows how to collect vibration data using iTestSystem and a cDAQ.…
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Wireless Strain Measurements with iTestSystem, LabVIEW, and Arduino
On a recent project, one of our engineers needed to measure structural strain at several locations on mobile lifting equipment while in operation. Since the strain measurements were distributed and mobile, a wireless internet of things (IOT) solution was required. This blog describes the steps and tools we used to integrate our solution into iTestSystem…
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Another Successful Condition Monitoring System Installation
Last week our team successfully and safely installed another Boiler Monitoring System (BMS). This system, a Sootblower Fouling Detection (SFD) system, monitors structural and vibration sensors that quantify the boiler’s response to sootblower operations. The SFD system analyzes the boiler response data and outputs Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) such as fouling level, sootblower efficiency,…
Have a measurement challenge? Talk to the engineers behind these articles.