Importing data

If your data acquisition system is something other than PAK, and you want to use the quality indicators and virtual points in DIRAC, you can do so in an import campaign.

How to: Start an import campaign in DIRAC

To start an import campaign, either click here to start a brand-new project, or click here if you already have a DIRAC project containing all the geometries, sensors and impacts.

First, replicate your physical test setup in DIRAC (like we’ve shown in the other tutorials). Then separately measure your FRFs and export them to ATFX or MATLAB files.

How to: Import data

Back in DIRAC, in the Data module, we need to map the channels from the data we’ve measured to the channels in the DIRAC project.

Click on Data to access the data importer. You can press the plus button to load the data through the file explorer, or you can drag and drop your data files here directly. On this screen you will automatically see some information on the type, size, and frequency range of the data.

How to: Map sensor channels

Moving on to step 2, we can map the channels in the DIRAC project on the left to the channels from the imported data files on the right. So make sure to keep track of what’s what in your test data. To map the channels, we just drag a sensor from the left to the corresponding channels on the right. As you see, it automatically maps all channels for that sensor sequentially, but we can also map them one by one. If we mess up, we can right click to delete the mapping. And if we have all the sensors in the same order as in the FRF data file, we can press shift to select all sensors and map them all simultaneously.

How to: Map excitation channels

Next, in step 3, we do the same thing for the excitations, mapping the excitations in the project to the ones in the imported data file.

How to: Review data

Once that stuff’s finished, we can browse through the data here, but it’s probably more useful to move onto the Analyze module to review the data and calculate Virtual Points, as explained in the other tutorials.