Early Warning System for Active Volcanoes: Smallest Movements Detectable with ADC card by Spectrum

Spectrum’s PCIe digitizer card detects smallest movements over a distance of six kilometers

Guatemala in Central America has three constantly active volcanos, all of which have villages near them so it is vitally important to have an early warning system for eruptions to save lives. Such systems already exist but these specific volcanos produce flows of Pyroclastic Density Current (PDC) instead of lava. The extremely dangerous PDC clouds consist of gas, rock and ash, traveling at speeds of up to 600 km/h with a heat of up to 800°C. It is therefore vital to have as much warning as possible for evacuations. A team from University College London (UCL), led by Dr Amin Amiri, is studying the PDCs and developing a radar-based early warning system with a very high level of sensitivity. The core part is a PCIe digitizer card by Spectrum Instrumentation, the model M2p.5921-x4. It is so sensitive that it can detect tiny movements at a distance of six kilometers, which is the distance that the equipment is set up from the slope of the volcano.

Fig. 1: The electronic system is housed in a metal box to prevent it from humidity, rain and wildlife in the jungle

The equipment consists of a X/Ku-band radar system including reflector dishes for transmit and receive. The returning signal is compared to the outgoing signal to produce an Intermediate Frequency (IF) signal containing range and movement information whenever a PDC shows up on the slope of the volcano. The IF signal is digitized by the M2p.5921-x4 Spectrum card with 20 MegaSamples per second and processed using Spectrum’s SBench 6 measurement software.

“We have just returned from setting up the equipment that is monitoring one of the slopes of the Santiaguito Volcano,” explained Dr Amin Amiri. “This is the first research into PDC events to try and understand the mechanisms for this type of volcanic activity.

Fig. 2: Active volcano “Santiaguito”, side volcano of the even bigger “Santa Maria” 

As you never know when it is about to happen, we have a seismic activity detector that turns on the radar system when it detects a tremor. This ensures we only capture relevant data on a PDC event. In this way we also conserve the battery power of the system which is deep in the Guatemalan jungle and charged by solar panels. We will be back in a couple of months to collect the stored data, and to install two more setups that will monitor the other two slopes.”

The original design was specified to work at a distance of four kilometers from the target, but the terrain in the jungle was not suitable so it was set up further back on a high spot of land six kilometers away. The team was concerned that the equipment would not be sensitive enough for this 50% increase in distance and used a drone flying over the jungle treetops to the slope as a moving target to verify that it was working properly.

“Sensitivity is the key to the success of this system as an early warning,” added Dr Amiri. “We tested the Spectrum card and found that it has an incredibly impressive low noise floor of -100 dBm so we could build a Moving Target Indicator (MTI) system that can see all small movements of the volcano that are the first signs of a PDC.”

The biggest challenges encountered by the team were the heat, the humidity and the mosquitos. Not only did they have to protect themselves from them but also all the electronics. A metal box is used to keep out the humidity, the rain and the wildlife but then cooling is a challenge as holes in the box are not possible and the temperature in the jungle exceeds 35°C.

Fig. 3: Setup of the first system at 6100 meters distance from the active volcano slope

Keeping the box in the shade and having a fan inside the box to keep the air circulating were a help. The team is now working on improvements for the next systems, such as large fins on top of the box to radiate heat away or a small solar-powered fridge. “One factor in selecting a card from Spectrum was that it’s specified to work over a large temperature and humidity range. Plus, it has thermal cut-out for protection if the environment becomes too hot,” concluded Dr Amiri. “I’ve used Spectrum cards in other projects, so I know their high standards of manufacture. I can be confident that it will keep on working deep in the jungle so I won’t have to fly half around the world to replace it!"

About Spectrum Instrumentation

Spectrum Instrumentation, founded in 1989, uses a unique modular concept to design and produce a wide range of more than 200 digitizers and generator products as PC-cards (PCIe and PXIe) and stand-alone Ethernet units (LXI). In 30 years, Spectrum has gained customers all around the world, including many A-brand industry-leaders and practically all prestigious universities. The company is headquartered near Hamburg, Germany, known for its 5-year warranty and outstanding support that comes directly from the design engineers. More information about Spectrum can be found at www.spectrum-instrumentation.com

SPECTRUM Digitizers and AWGs now support NVIDIA ClaraT

NVIDIA-Clara rear

Spectrum Instrumentation now offers driver support for the NVIDIA Clara AGX™, a universal computing architecture for the next generation of AI medical instruments. The new drivers enable scientists and developers to choose from 64 different Spectrum Digitizers, Arbitrary Waveform Generators (AWGs) and Digital I/O cards, letting the NVIDIA Clara AGX kit perform high-speed electronic signal acquisition and generation for analog and digital signals. With the big variety of cards to choose from, users can exactly match their electronic signal requirements.

For example, the digitizer cards can be used to acquire signals in the DC to GHz frequency ranges by sampling them at rates from 5 MS/s up to a maximum of 5 GS/s. Similarly, the AWG cards can be used to produce signals with almost any wave shape and frequency content, from DC to 400 MHz, by outputting samples at speeds from 40 MS/s up to 1.25 GS/s. Individual analog cards offer one, two, four or eight channel capability. Digital I/O cards and Digital Data Acquisition cards allow the acquisition of digital data at rates up to 720 MS/s and can generate digital patterns at up to 125 MS/s. There are different interface options for TTL and LVDS available.

The NVIDIA Clara AGX developer kit provides an easy-to-use platform for developing software-defined, AI-enabled, real-time, point-of-care medical devices. It delivers real-time streaming connectivity and AI inference by combining the flexibility of the NVIDIA® Jetson AGX Xavier™ embedded Arm® system on a chip (SoC), the performance of the integrated NVIDIA RTX™ 6000 GPU, and the 100 GbE connectivity of the NVIDIA ConnectX® SmartNIC, Clara AGX. The kit also includes full-stack GPU-accelerated libraries, SDKs, and reference applications for developers, data scientists, and researchers to create real-time, secure, and scalable solutions.

Adding a Spectrum card to the Clara system allows sensor signals to be acquired, generated, stored and processed. Data can be streamed between the cards, the processor and the GPU. In fact, the high-speed parallel processing capabilities of the GPU make it the perfect platform for handling the large volumes of data that can be acquired and generated by the Spectrum products. Spectrum already offers SCAPP (Spectrum's CUDA Access for Parallel Processing) to make GPU-based data processing easily achievable, even at the fastest streaming rates.

M4i.6631-x8

 
Looking at some examples: One or two cards of the M2p-series (5 MS/s to 125 MS/s) can be installed into the kit, as in Pic 2. The AWG signal generator card with 4 channels and the digitizer with 8 channels are running fully synchronized at a speed of 125 MS/s on all channels. Choosing one card of the ultra-fast M4i-series, such as the popular M4i.6631-x8 in Pic 3, turns the kit into an extremely low-noise AWG with signal generation up to 1.25 GS/s output speed on two channels. Another example uses the M4i.2212-x8 digitizer card that is already a core part of the world's first, high-throughput cell sorter created by the University of Tokyo in 2019. It allows signal acquisition up to 1.25 GS/s on four channels, with up to 3.4 GBytes per second streaming and high-speed processing via Spectrums SCAPP drivers and the internal NVIDIA RTX 6000 GPU of the Clara kit.

The NVIDIA Clara is already being used in a number of biomedical research programs and next generation of medical devices. Applications include imaging, genomics, patient monitoring, and drug discovery. It can be found everywhere the healthcare industry is innovating and accelerating the journey to precision medicine. Now, by installing a Spectrum card, or cards, this powerful platform has an easy way to acquire and generate the fast electronic sensor signals that are often found in this cutting-edge field.

Oliver Rovini, Chief Technical Officer at Spectrum, said: "We were delighted to be approached by NVIDIA, and partner with them to develop drivers for their NVIDIA Clara platform. Spectrum already has many customers using our technology in medical science. Now, together with the NVIDIA Clara, they have an easy way to create very small, low power systems, that offer some of the most advanced data processing tools available today."

Like all products by Spectrum Instrumentation, the 64 different M2p- and M4i-series cards carry a 5-year product warranty, with free software and firmware updates, as well as customer support directly from the engineering team, for the whole lifetime of the product. For more information, please visit:

www.spectrum-instrumentation.com

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