The French aerospace research centre, ONERA, has acquired a 200-channel Brüel & Kjær PULSE™ acoustic data acquisition system for wind tunnel testing.

The system's first use will be for scale-model, aero-acoustic measurements at the S1 large sonic wind tunnel in Modane, after which ONERA will use the system in a number of its other wind tunnels.

This system integrates with the wind-tunnel control system at the Modane facility, which can remotely control the data acquisition process. During data recording, process data is simultaneously displayed together with real-time acoustic data in the form of time/frequency plots.

Based on Brüel & Kjær's standard PULSE LAN-XI Data Acquisition Hardware and analysis platform, the system provides a dedicated, streamlined workflow to handle the system setup, data recording and post-processing analysis - and is suitably sized to handle the large data throughput.

Acoustic measurements in wind tunnel systems are categorised by the large number of channels needed, high data sampling frequencies, tight phase matching between channels and the high dynamic range of recorded levels.