CHATTER: Determination of Relay Contact Chatter Performance During Seismic Testing
Shake table testing of relays and similar electro mechanical devices often requires
that the chattering of contact be monitored. There is concern that vibration induced
chatter may cause adverse system operation. Hence, a typical criterion is that contacts
do not chatter (change their state) for over 2 ms. CHATTER monitors multi channel
(16-128) contact performance and provides a summary indicating if these criteria
have been met.
Contacts are typically energized with a 5 VDC signal and resistively loaded to pass
a 20 mA current. Normally Closed (NC) contacts will consequently be monitored to
see if the 5 VDC remains constant or drops to 0 VDC, indicating chatter. On the
other hand Normally Open contacts (NO) will be monitored to determine if they remain
at 0 VDC or chatter to 5 VDC.
CHATTER provides a histogram of the number of chatter events of various widths (2,
4, 8, … 128 ms) and indicates if the contact passes the 2 ms criteria.
CHATTER is a PC-based, ANCO written Virtual Instrument (VI) using LabVIEW and National
Instruments hardware for data acquisition.
