Customized Acoustical-Analysis Programs continued...

Fast Automated Processing
In addition to the preliminary plots of events vs. location and amplitude vs. location, the Origin-based application provides several other representations of the data, also at the push of a button, that can help users determine which clusters to evaluate closely. One 2D histogram function breaks up the data by location (usually in 6 inch bins) and amplitude (usually 3dB bins), and results in a matrix, which is then displayed as a color contour plot. This event density contour plot might indicate that there were 200 events with amplitude of between 60 dB and 63 dB between 100 and 106 inches along the pipe. Another contour plot shows event density versus location and time with plant load factors (temperature, pressure, etc.) over-plotted on the same time scale. All plots take advantage of Origin's presentation quality graphics capability, employing color to make the data easy to interpret.

With Origin, it is possible to make essentially any imaginable change to the visual display of data. Every worksheet and graph aspect is independently available. It is possible to use whatever fonts, orientations, sizes and colors needed to visually express relationships in complex datasets. Data dependent on multiple independent variables can be displayed on the same page, clearly showing the connections between the variables. It's easy to resize graphs so that as many as are needed to illustrate the critical relationship will fit on a single page. It is also easy to move graphs to other Windows applications for use in slide presentations and reports, or export in JPG or other graphics formats for posting to web sites, etc.

The analysis program saves time in presentation of data in another way as well. In the past, the user had to add a title block to every graph indicating relevant information. Now, the custom program automatically pulls that information from the customer worksheet that was filled out at the start of the analysis. If special text is desired, the user can click on the title block and change its properties.

The Origin-based AE analysis program has dramatically improved the speed and ease of AE data analysis. The time required to generate a cluster analysis has been reduced from several hours to a few minutes -- saving a considerable amount of an engineer's time that can be devoted to understanding, rather than just manipulating, the acoustic signal data.

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