Parallel Data Acquisition System Research Articles

Neutron Capture and Transmission Measurements of 54Fe at the RPI LINAC

54Fe radiative capture cross section and transmission measurements were conducted at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) Gaerttner Linear Accelerator (LINAC) Center using an enriched 54Fe sample in the keV energy region. 54Fe is a constituent of natural iron, which is present in a large variety of nuclear grade materials. Therefore, it is important to have an accurate understanding of the cross sections of 54Fe, which can be measured experimentally. In the time-of-flight measurements conducted at the LINAC, an array of four C6D6 detectors surrounded the sample and radiative capture data were collected using a digital data acquisition system. Additionally, a Li-glass detector was used to collect transmission data using an analog data acquisition system. The radiative capture yield of the 54Fe measurements were normalized to saturated resonances observed in Au and Ta to obtain an absolute capture yield. The preliminary capture yield and preliminary transmission obtained can be compared to evaluations and existing experimental data. Some disagreements were observed in prominent d-wave capture resonances observed in 54Fe in the low-keV neutron energy region. Both sets of experimental data along with pre-existing datasets will greatly enhance RPI’s ability to perform resonance evaluation for 54Fe up to roughly 1 MeV.

A general-purpose data acquisition system and a waveform analysis algorithm based on digitization

<p indent=0mm>Given that the nuclei studied in the nuclear physics experiments are expanding away from the stable nuclear region, traditional analog electronics acquisition systems cannot satisfy the requirements of experiments that involve short-lived, low-yield nucleus productions under high background. In recent years, digital data acquisition systems have shown significant advantages over the analog electronics system and have been widely used in nuclear physics research such as studies of short-lived charged particle emitters which involve overlapping ion-particle or particle-particle signals, and studies of sub-microsecond isomers observed in fragmentation reactions. A general-purpose digital data acquisition system and a dedicated waveform analysis algorithm recently developed by the Group of Experimental Nuclear Physics, Peking University are introduced in this paper. This digital data acquisition system which is composed of 16-channel digital pulse processor Pixie-16 modules from XIA LLC is a versatile, flexible, and expandable data acquisition system designed for nuclear physics research. Although the triggerless mode, which records all live events without event selection, provides an attractive option for users because it has great flexibility for offline data analysis, it generates significant data streams in the experiments with high counting rates, which may then exceed the digital data acquisition system’s I/O capability. Therefore, a flexible trigger system based on the field programmable gate array has been developed to accommodate different experimental needs. The trigger system is configured through the hardware description language (VDHL/verilog), which can set up and debug different experiment logics conveniently. Many offline analysis tools have been developed to help users quickly optimize parameters for various types of detectors without time-consuming tests and measurements. A comparison between this digital data acquisition system and the conventional analog data acquisition system has been made. At a low count rate, both systems exhibit good and comparable energy resolution. At a high count rate above 8.8 k/s, while the energy resolution obtained by the analog system deteriorates significantly, the energy resolution obtained by the digital data acquisition system remains nearly unchanged. Moreover, experimental data with higher statistics can be collected by the digital data acquisition system. The advantage of this digital data acquisition system over the conventional analog system is ascribed to its excellent capability of handling pile-up pulses at higher count rates, and nearly zero dead time in data transmission and conversion. An effective digital pulse processing method has been developed for the decomposition of pile-up pulses which result from the signals of μs α decay. This method is able to decompose the multiple pile-up pulses with very close separation in time scale and large range of relative amplitude. The method was validated with the very short-lived α emitter ²¹⁹Th (<italic>T</italic>_1/2= 1.08 μs) and the internal conversion electron decays of ^210,211Ra isomers (<italic>T</italic>_1/2=2.27, 4.0 μs) produced by ⁴⁰Ar+¹⁸⁶W. The results show that this method can resolve pile-up pulses with time separation as short as <sc>80 ns.</sc> The energy resolution for signals with time separation down to <sc>80 ns</sc> is <sc>32 keV.</sc> The internal conversion electron decay with energy as low as <sc>70 keV</sc> can be well identified. This digital data acquisition system has been successfully used in many experiments performed at China Institute of Atomic Energy, Institute of Modern Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Dongguan Campus, Institute of High Energy Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and South Africa iThemba LABS, and has demonstrated its versatility and high efficiency.

Cost-Effective Quasi-Parallel Sensing Instrumentation for Industrial Chemical Species Tomography

Chemical species tomography (CST) has been widely applied for the imaging of critical gas-phase parameters in industrial processes. To acquire high-fidelity images, CST is typically implemented by the line-of-sight wavelength modulation spectroscopy measurements from multiple laser beams. In this article, we present a novel quasi-parallel sensing technique and electronic circuits for industrial CST. Although the acquisition and processing of these multiple beams using a fully parallel data acquisition and signal processing system can achieve maximized temporal response in CST, it leads to a highly complex and power-consuming instrumentation with electronics-caused inconsistency between the sampled beams, in addition to a significant burden on data transfer infrastructure. To address these issues, the digitization and demodulation of the multibeam signals in the proposed quasi-parallel sensing technique are multiplexed over the high-frequency modulation within a wavelength scan. Our development not only maintains the temporal response of the fully parallel sensing scheme but also facilitates the cost-effective implementation of industrial CST with very low complexity and reduced load on data transfer compared with the fully parallel sensing technique. The proposed technique was analytically proofed and then numerically examined by noise-contaminated CST simulations. Finally, the designed electronics was experimentally validated using a lab-scale CST system with 32 laser beams.

Design of a Quad-Channel Analog Data Acquisition System Based on FPGA

In order to implement the acquisition and processing of signals from imaging systems, a data acquisition system based on FPGA was designed with the requirements of multi-channel, high-resolution and compactness. The data acquisition (DAQ) system uses a quad-channel 12-bit analog-to-digital converter (ADC) AD9228-65 as the front-end core chip, and a series of signal conditioning circuits to form the front-end system. FPGA is used as the data acquisition, logic control, data readout and processing. After preliminary testing, the DAQ system has the advantages of low power, low cost, high-speed, small size.

The Development of High-Precision & High-Speed Synchronous Data Acquisition System in Vacuum-Thermal Test

The Vacuum-Thermal test is an important test to verify the correctness of the thermal design and ensure its long-term reliable operation during the development of the spacecraft. At present, the temperature measurement in the Vacuum-Thermal Test mostly adopts the serial mode to complete the data acquisition of the large data volume temperature sensor. This method balances performance and costs well. However, in some special circumstances, it cannot accurately reflect the instantaneous temperature of the test piece. Aiming at this problem, a high-precision and high-speed fully parallel data acquisition system is designed. Based on the accuracy of the original temperature data acquisition, high-speed synchronization technology is used to accurately acquire the transient temperature data of the spacecraft to verify the transient heat of the spacecraft. Features provide a data foundation.

In vivo optoacoustic temperature imaging for image-guided cryotherapy of prostate cancer

The objective of this study is to demonstrate in vivo the feasibility of optoacoustic temperature imaging during cryotherapy of prostate cancer. We developed a preclinical prototype optoacoustic temperature imager that included pulsed optical excitation at a wavelength of 805 nm, a modified clinical transrectal ultrasound probe, a parallel data acquisition system, image processing and visualization software. Cryotherapy of a canine prostate was performed in vivo using a commercial clinical system, Cryocare® CS, with an integrated ultrasound imaging. The universal temperature-dependent optoacoustic response of blood was employed to convert reconstructed optoacoustic images to temperature maps. Optoacoustic imaging of temperature during prostate cryotherapy was performed in the longitudinal view over a region of 30 mm (long) × 10 mm (deep) that covered the rectum, the Denonvilliers fascia, and the posterior portion of the treated gland. The transrectal optoacoustic images showed high-contrast vascularized regions, which were used for quantitative estimation of local temperature profiles. The constructed temperature maps and their temporal dynamics were consistent with the arrangement of the cryoprobe and readouts of the thermal needle sensors. The temporal profiles of the readouts from the thermal needle sensors and the temporal profile estimated from the normalized optoacoustic intensity of the selected vascularized region showed significant resemblance, except for the initial overshoot, that may be explained as a result of the physiological thermoregulatory compensation. The temperature was mapped with errors not exceeding ±2 °C (standard deviation) consistent with the clinical requirements for monitoring cryotherapy of the prostate. In vivo results showed that the optoacoustic temperature imaging is a promising non-invasive technique for real-time imaging of tissue temperature during cryotherapy of prostate cancer, which can be combined with transrectal ultrasound—the current standard for guiding clinical cryotherapy procedure.

A Reconfigurable Parallel Data Acquisition System for Tunable Diode Laser Absorption Spectroscopy Tomography

The design of the data acquisition instrument directly affects the temporal resolution of laser absorption spectroscopy (LAS) tomographic system. In this paper, a parallel data acquisition system was designed and applied to collect 60 channels of absorption light intensity data. In the design, the data collecting process and the data uploading process were bridged by adding memory chips on data acquisition circuits. The temporal resolution of fan beam parallel acquisition LAS tomographic system was thus reconfigurable to 1–8k frames/s and the data from 60 channels for each frame was synchronized. Experiment results were implemented on an acoustic excitation impulse flame burner, and H2O was chosen as the target absorbing species for the laser absorption. Temperature distributions for the excitation cycles were reconstructed and presented. The system performances at different working frame rates were compared, and it had a high temporal resolution of up to 8k frames/s.

Three-component Parallel and Synchronous Seismic Data Acquisition Based on Time-division Sampling System

To economize power dissipation and volume of the three-component parallel and synchronous seismic data acquisition system, under the inspiration of sampling rate conversion theory in the digital signal processing, a project of three-component parallel and synchronous seismic data acquisition method is proposed based on time-division sampling system, in which triple interpolation is implemented in the three sets of data acquired by time-division sampling. Then another interpolation or decimation is carried out to aim at converting sampling rate of the system into the target value. Results of the error analysis show that the accuracy of numerical calculation in this conversion process is superior to the resolution ratio of hardware system. the prominent dominant of this project is that power dissipation and volume of parallel and synchronous acquisition system applied to band-limited signal are optimized and performance of the whole system is improved.

Extended Bonner sphere spectrometer for dynamic neutron spectrum on HL-2A

The extended Bonner sphere spectrometer (EBSS) at the HL-2A tokamak for the neutron spectrum is described. This device was developed on the basis of previous Bonner sphere spectrometry (BSS), aiming to obtain a more accurate neutron spectrum in the HL-2A tokamak hall. The previous BSS contained eight Bonner spheres (BS). This EBSS contains 13 3He-filled detectors embedded in polyethylene spheres (PS), pre-amplifiers, and a parallel processing data acquisition system (DAQ). A response matrix is simulated in Geant4 taking the effect of the environment into account.

Synchronous parallel high-performance data acquisition system

This paper reports a parallel data acquisition system for the synchronous capturing of a large number of low frequency signals. The system is scalable from 48 to 386 separate 16 bit analog to digital converters without any analog multiplexing. The synchronization is done using programmable logic, and works with several speeds up to 80 kS/s. Therefore, we are able to simultaneously measure in real time and send the data to a PC using USB-2.0. The system is currently used, but is not limited, to measure neuronal signals.

Equipment Servo System Signal Acquisition Module Design Based on Embedded

Contrary to the difficult for complex equipment in the parallel signal acquisition, thereby affecting the equipment condition monitoring results, Design a parallel signal data acquisition device and its collection method based on embedded system. It can achieve real-time multi-point data collection and analyze parallel signal data acquisition system structure and function, then giving the hardware design of embedded systems based on the chip, including the processes of mass storage system and a plurality of communication method. Realize of the equipment condition monitoring and fault diagnosis based on this.

The implementation of FPGA for data transmission between ADC and DSP peripherals in the measurement channels for power quality assessment

The paper presents the FPGA Xilinx Spartan 3 series implementation in an analog data acquisition system, in particular consisting of nine ADCs and the TigerSHARC DSP processor. Because of different standards of ADC and DSP data interfaces, the exchange of data between them requires the use of an intermediary device for combining their communication ports. The procedures for sending data from the ADC to the FPGA buffers, their conversion and subsequent transmission to the TigerSHARC DSP are described. The digital representations of ADC analog input signals are sent to the FPGA through three lines of serial interface at the physical layer compatible with the SPI standard. After processing in the FPGA they are sent to the DSP, with the four-line interface in the LVDS standard. The paper discusses the properties of related interfaces, standards, procedures and control of ADC issues as well as the algorithms of the FPGA configuration program and functions implemented in this system. Selected results of functional testing are shown.

TU‐C‐108‐05: High Density Organic Scintillator Arrays for High Resolution Stereotactic Body Radiation Therapy Dosimetry

Purpose: Radiation oncology patients receiving stereotactic body radiation therapy (SBRT) are treated with high dose and high dose rate treatment procedures in which delivered dose should be recorded, and verified for quality assurance and patient safety. We implemented a high resolution scintillating fiber detector array to perform high resolution dosimetry of SBRT fields. Materials: Scintillating fibers have a water equivalent attenuation coefficient, excellent reproducibility, stability and a linear response versus dose, do not require any polarizing voltage, and are water impermeable. We constructed a high resolution dosimeter based on an array of sub‐millimeter organic fiber sensors mounted on a supporting frame that provides support, alignment, and buildup material. The fiber detector interface consists of a high density linear array of high speed linear photodetectors. The analog output is transmitted to a high throughput parallel data acquisition system integrated with a dedicated computer for signal processing, analysis, and recording. The detector was specially designed to perform high resolution dosimetric verification of small SBRT fields delivered with conventional dose rates (600 MU/min) to high dose rate flattening filter free beams (up to 2400 MU/min). Results: We determined fiber sensor sensitivity and linearity response with respect to beam intensity field size and dose. Detector spatial resolution is 0.5 mm and linearity response with respect to beam intensity and field size was within 2% for photon beams from 6MV to 18 MV and electron beams from 6 MeV to 20 MeV. Spatial beam profiles were compared with film dosimetry showing excellent agreement within 3% in the penumbra region. Conclusions: The development of this technology addresses the need for high resolution dosimeters for SBRT. The developed detector provides accurate dose, beam localization, and beam profile verification and will be a valuable tool for quality assurance of SBRT treatments.

Evaluation of Ultrasound Synthetic Aperture Imaging Using Bidirectional Pixel-Based Focusing: Preliminary Phantom and In Vivo Breast Study

In medical ultrasound imaging, lateral resolution is limited when using a fixed transmit focusing. Various synthetic aperture (SA) techniques, in which two-way dynamic focusing is enabled by utilizing prebeamformed radio-frequency (RF) data have been proposed for improving the spatial resolution. However, SA methods were not extensively evaluated in terms of their clinical performance. In this paper, a phantom and an in vivo evaluation of the SA method with bidirectional pixel-based focusing (BiPBF) is presented in comparison with the conventional beamforming. The performance of the proposed SA-BiPBF was assessed with a blind study and the established breast imaging-reporting and data system (BI-RADS), in addition to measuring contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR) and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Prebeamformed RF data were acquired from a tissue mimicking phantom (Model 040, CIRS Inc., Norfolk, VA, USA) and from patients with breast lesions by using a commercial ultrasound scanning system with a linear array transducer equipped with a research package and parallel data acquisition system (SonixTouch, SonixDAQ, and L14-5/38, Ultrasonix Corp., Canada). In phantom and in vivo experiments, a default setting of a breast preset was applied (e.g., the center frequency of 10MHz and acoustic output of MI = 0.66). In phantom experiment, the SA-BiPBF method showed higher CNR and SNR values compared to the conventional method (3.4 and 23.9dB versus 3.1 and 15.8dB, respectively). In addition, the lateral resolution and penetration depth were increased by 95.4% and 40.3%, respectively. Consistent with the phantom experiment, in the in vivo experiment with ten patients, the CNR value for the SA method was 3.3 ± 0.5 compared to 2.8 ± 0.8 for the conventional method. Similarly, the SNR values with the SA-BiPBF and conventional methods were 34.0 ± 3.6 and 27.2 ± 3.4dB, respectively. From the experiments, it was shown in side-by-side comparisons that the image quality of the SA-BiPBF method was considerably improved in both phantom and in vivo breast images. However, the SA-BiPBF image showed different features compared to the conventional one in the in vivo experiments. These features are resulting from the increased image quality of the SA-BiPBF method but are not always perceived as improvements by the radiologists.

VME Bus-Based Multiprocessor Parallel Data Acquisition System

Synchronization data acquistition system with multiple processors is the trend of the modern manufacturing equipment development. Complex high-precision equipment even has hundreds of sensors and they are acquiring data at the same time, the sensors are distributed in dozens of data acquisition cards. The key technology is the acquisition system enable to synchro-gather data from data acquisition cards which base on data bus between them and then sent the gather data to arithmetic system. In order to synchronic data integration, it is required a high-speed and low-latency data channels and a suitable data protocol between data acquisition cards and main control card. This paper introduce a new type of synchronous data acquisition system, through the self-defined data bus and a specific memory allocation mechanism, the data acquisition system can sent the integrate data to arithmetic system through main control card after it get the data from acquisition cards, the transfer delay of data exchange is nanoseconds.

High Precision Analog Data Acquisition System with Signal Transformer Isolation Technique

High Precision Analog Data Acquisition System with Signal Transformer Isolation Technique

Three‐dimensional thermoacoustic imaging for early breast cancer detection

Microwave-induced thermoacoustic tomography (TAT) is a noninvasive modality based on the differences in microwave absorption of various biological tissues. In this paper, the feasibility of the early breast tumor detection by TAT system has been discussed and validated experimentally. A fast TAT system, which based on three 128-elements transducers, a 384-64ch switch and a parallel data acquisition system (DAS), was developed to reconstruct the three-dimensional (3D) image of a breast model with similar microwave absorption coefficient to breast tissue. A novel method to explore the ability of TAT system to distinguish absorption coefficient was introduced and the minimum absorption coefficient difference that can be distinguished clearly by our TAT system is 12 m(-1). The potential applications of the TAT system were clearly demonstrated by successfully mapping breast model with mimicked tumors and microcalcification. An imaging experiment of human breast tumor embedding in the breast model was performed and the tumor was visualized by the 3D thermoacoustic volume. The thermoacoustic images match well with the samples and achieve penetration depth of 6 cm. The experimental results indicate that TAT has a great potential to be used for detecting early-stage breast cancers with high contrast and high resolution.

Results for the response function determination of the Compact Neutron Spectrometer

The Compact Neutron Spectrometer (CNS) is a Joint European Torus (JET) Enhancement Project, designed for fusion diagnostics in different plasma scenarios. The CNS is based on a liquid scintillator (BC501A) which allows good discrimination between neutron and gamma radiation. Neutron spectrometry with a BC501A spectrometer requires the use of a reliable, fully characterized detector. The determination of the response matrix was carried out at the Ion Accelerator Facility (PIAF) of the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB). This facility provides several monoenergetic beams (2.5, 8, 10, 12 and 14 MeV) and a white field (Emax ∼ 17 MeV), which allows for a full characterization of the spectrometer in the region of interest (from ∼ 1.5 MeV to ∼ 17 MeV). The energy of the incoming neutrons was determined by the time of flight method (TOF), with time resolution in the order of 1 ns. To check the response matrix, the measured pulse height spectra were unfolded with the code MAXED and the resulting energy distributions were compared with those obtained from TOF. The CNS project required modification of the PTB BC501A spectrometer design, to replace an analog data acquisition system (NIM modules) with a digital system developed by the Ente per le Nuove tecnologie, l'Energia e l'Ambiente (ENEA). Results for the new digital system were evaluated using new software developed specifically for this project.

Design of a LXI High-Speed Parallel Data Acquisition System

The research on establishing an automated data acquisition system with high speed and accuracy is a hot topic in measurement and testing area. The desire is extremely high in data acquisition systems with high speed, multi-channels and large capacity, therefore research into this field becomes very important and significant. In this paper, a LXI high speed parallel data acquisition system which is combined LXI bus with high-speed data acquisition ability is proposed. And the signal conditioning circuit, ADC, data storage circuit, FPGA main control circuit and LXI interface circuit are introduced in detail. The remote control of the data acquisition system and the high speed transmission of data are realized by using the LXI bus.

Fluorescence yield X-ray absorption spectroscopy for O-Kα with elimination of N-Kα background using superconducting tunnel junction detectors

Fluorescent yield X-ray absorption fine structure (XAFS) spectroscopy is widely used for measuring chemical or physical states of particular elements in materials. A superconducting tunnel junction (STJ) detector is promising for X-ray absorption spectroscopy, especially in a soft X-ray region below 1keV, because of an excellent energy resolution of 10–20eV, which is crucial for resolving the characteristic X-ray lines from dilute light elements in materials, and a high photon-counting-rate. We constructed an X-ray absorption spectrometer using a 100-pixel STJ array detector mounted on a cryogen-free 3He cryostat and a parallel data acquisition system. It has been confirmed that the STJ detector produces a single peak for the O-Kα line (525eV) with energy resolution of 22eV in full width at half maximum. An XAFS spectrum only for the oxygen atoms from a SiN/SiO2 thin film sample was successfully obtained by using the clear separation between the O-Kα line and the N-Kα line (392eV), eliminating the effect of the N-Kα background.