Since 1987 the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has been providing to each of its crash and sled test contractors a signal waveform generator (SWG) which supplies precision test waveforms to evaluate the facility's crash or sled test data acquisition system performance for compliance to SAE J211 requirements. As more experience was gained with the SWG, requests from crash test sites world wide to borrow an SWG increased until they exceeded the numbers of SWGs in existence. The SWG was custom designed and built in the early 80's because the required technology was not commercially available. Although the basic electronic design is good, its mechanical construction left the SWG vulnerable to shipment from one site to another and reliability on site was poor. Since the required technology is now available, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has developed a system that uses commercially available hardware to the extent possible and can be used by any crash or sled test site in the world to evaluate its own system. (A)
Abstract