Product specs for National Instruments Corporation 781771-01

The NI PXIe-4844 optical sensor interrogator is a dual-slot 3U PXI Express DAQ module for fiber Bragg grating (FBG) optical sensors. It has four optical channels that are simultaneously sampled at 10 Hz for measurement of FBG strain and temperature sensors.

The NI PXIe-4844 features an optical core, which combines a high-power, low-noise swept wavelength laser with fiber Fabry-Perot tunable filter technology from Micron Optics. Each optical channel has an 80 nm wavelength range (1510 to 1590 nm), which can typically scan up to 20 FBG sensors per channel (more than 80 FBG sensors per module, depending on sensor range and sensitivity).

You can further extend the maximum number of FBG sensors per module by connecting one or more optical channels to an external optical multiplexer or by adding more NI PXIe-4844 modules in the same PXI chassis. The NI PXIe-4844 can also be integrated into the same chassis as other PXI modules for electrical data acquisition and control.

You configure the NI PXIe-4844 and FBG sensors in the NI-OSI Explorer, a configuration manager that scans the optical wavelength range to identify all connected FBG sensors. After you specify the range and scaling equations for each detected FBG, all scans automatically parse the channel data into individual sensor measurements and scale the data into appropriate engineering units. You can export this scaling configuration for use in the NI-OSI LabVIEW API.

The NI-OSI LabVIEW API has a similar look and feel to NI-DAQmx driver software. Data is returned as an array that you can directly wire to a LabVIEW chart to display scaled data in a value-versus-time format.

To learn more about the benefits of FBG technology and optical sensing, visit ni.com/opticalsensing.