Electrical noise reduction techniques contributing to improved data quality at the National Transonic Facility

In initial use, the high-speed digital data acquisition systems at Langley Research Center's National Transonic Facility produced data containing unacceptably high noise levels. Described is a process whereby the contributing noise sources were identified and eliminated. The effects of 60 Hz power, system grounding, EMI/RFI, and other problems are discussed and the corrective action taken is outlined. The overall effort resulted in an improvement of greater than 5:1 in system performance. Although the report describes a system specifically used for wind tunnel data acquisition, the corrective techniques employed are generally applicable to large scale high-speed data systems where signal resolution in the low microvolts range is important.