Application Summary
The water content and fiber structure of raw stock board is an important characteristic in determining its strength and use. A large university providing basic research under a grant from the lumber industry developed a simple two-sensor impact test to determine board quality. A custom hammer containing an accelerometer is used to strike a board. The resulting vibration is analyzed to determine the structure and moisture of the wood under test.

Potential Solution
Originally, the researchers considered using an 8-bit digital storage oscilloscope (DSO). However, this potential solution had insufficient resolution and lacked a convenient means to tranfer the data to a PC for analysis. Also, the DSO was not portable enough for field testing of raw lumber.

IOtech’s Solution
The university researchers chose IOtech’s WaveBook PC-based data acquisition system. Because the WaveBook leverages off the processing power of an attached PC, the system provides the performance of dedicated instruments for far less cost. Offering data acquisition rates up to 1 MHz, the WaveBook is the fastest digitizer of its kind, offering the speed required for FFT data capture. The system included WaveView Out-of-the-Box software, which permitted easy, fast set up without programming. The researchers used WaveView to acquire the data, display it in real time, and store it to the PC’s hard disk. Then they used a custom software program to analyze the test results.