| MINIDAU® Advanced |
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Kayser-Threde has been manufacturing crash test data acquisition systems since 1976. The demands on such systems have steadily risen over the years. The Kayser-Threde engineers have continuously implemented state-of-the-art technology to fulfil these demands. 1998 Kayser-Threde’s redesign of the on-board measuring equipment lead to a completely new data acquisition system, the MINIDAU® (Miniaturized Data Acquisition System). It was developed in close cooperation with our worldwide customers. Having delivered more than 40000 data acquisition channels to more than 80 customers since, Kayser-Threde is the world leader in this field. In 2006/2007 Kayser-Threde spent more than one year of engineering in the development of a totally new amplifier for the MINIDAU®. The most modern technology and components were utilized to design and manufacture the latest amplifier inside the MINIDAU®. Compatibility was one of the most important requirements for this design. We feel that it is crucial to provide an easy upgrade path to utilize the latest technology, and maintain a reliable product which will be continuously available for many years. The result is the new amplifier for the MINIDAU® Advanced and the MINIDAU® Classic. The MINIDAU® Advanced offers all the features of a standard 16-bit MINIDAU® plus several extended functions for users with extended requirements. Since Kayser-Threde believes that the protection of investments is extremely important for our customers, it is possible to upgrade existing MINIDAU®s with the advanced features by simply exchanging amplifier modules. This means that every MINIDAU® that has been delivered up to now is “Advanced ready” - all customers can benefit from the new features. Many features of the MINIDAU® Advanced are the same as of a MINIDAU® Classic: 32 or 96 analog and 16 digital inputs. Each analog channel comprises a programmable input amplifier, bridge excitation, 16 bit A/D converter for simultaneous sampling. The amplifier gain precision is better than 0.2% and the input impedance above 10 MOhm. The gain values can be programmed in steps from 1 to 10000. An internal reference voltage is used for precise control of the amplifier setting. Neither potentiometers nor trimmers nor mechanical switches are used inside the device. All adjustments are implemented by software, automatically or by command. Shunt measurement and check is implemented as a full 4 quadrant circuit with internal emulation of customer specific shunt resistor values. External shunt resistors are In contrast to former designs, the low-pass filter is a pure anti-aliasing filter with an adaptive cutoff frequency that fits to the currently selected sampling frequency. All necessary additional filtering, e.g. according to SAE filter classes, is done during post processing. Sampling and Storage of measurement data has been implemented similar to the proven design of the conventional Minidau, using volatile sram memory during pretrigger and non volatile Nand flash memory for data storage. Batteries are not needed to retain the data, even for many years! and prevents data loss, even in case of possible malfunctions of the trigger signal. This is the main error cause, apart from user errors. The trigger point is registered and recorded. Once a valid trigger point is stored in the MINIDAU® data memory, the user can select only the actual measured data for transfer to a PC, it is not necessary to read out the complete data memory.
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