United Electronic Industries High-Performance Data Acquisition Systems for the Naval Industry

United Electronic Industries (UEI) provides solutions for a wide range of military data acquisition, monitoring and control applications.

The company’s products are designed to handle adverse environmental conditions, conforming to MIL-STD-810, MIL-STD-461 and MIL-STD-1275 requirements of temperatures from 40°C to 85°C, shock to 100G, and vibration to 5G respectively.

Military-grade chassis for naval applications

The UEI MIL chassis is designed to meet the most commonly required elements of MIL-STD-461 and MIL-STD-810, and sealed to at least IP66 / NEMA6 standards.

The chassis has no rotary cooling fans in the design, which maximizes meantime between failures (MTBF) and mechanical reliability.

All internal printed circuitboards are conformal-coated to ensure high reliability, and connectivity is achieved through restriction of the use of certain hazardous substances (RoHS) compliant connectors.

UEI’s rugged hardware and input/output (I/O) capabilities are suitable for applications with extreme environments, including marine-craft control, ROV and unmanned rovers, submarine engine monitoring, and more.

With both embedded and standalone solutions, as well as ethernet and wireless connectivity options, the company offers systems customized to each client’s needs.

COTS chassis platforms for analogue and digital I/O boards

The UEI MIL chassis platform is 100% commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) and supported by the company’s extensive range of compatible analogue, digital and interface I/O boards.

This range includes analogue inputs up to 24bits, thermocouples, resistance-temperature detectors (RTDs), integrated circuit piezoelectric (ICP) / integrated electronics piezoelectric (IEPE) sensors, ARINC-429/453/708, MIL-STD-1553, linear variable differential transformer (LVDT) / rotary variable differential transformer (RVDT).

Other compatible I/O boards include synchro / resolver, RS-232/422/485, strain gauge, quadrature encoder, high-voltage analogue outputs (up to 1,15V DC) with high-drive analogue output (up to 200mA), and function generator outputs.

State-of-the-art software compatibility

UEI supports a wide variety of operating systems, programming languages and application packages, including VxWorks.

In conjunction with the company’s MIL unit’s dual ethernet ports, the VxWorks application allows the link to the host PC to be implemented in a fully redundant network.

Command, control and navigation systems for naval vessels

The navy needed a platform for 75 landing craft air cushion (LCAC) marine crafts, specifically the command, control, computers, communication and navigation (C4N), and the SBC4 control, alarm and monitoring systems (CAMS).

UEI was selected for its rugged and flexible COTS embedded military rack system, as well as its compliance to the required military environmental specifications.

Based on a robust PowerPC processor, running VxWorks with fully redundant ethernet connectivity to the boat’s host computer, the UEI system replaces the previous controller and provides a smaller, more reliable solution that is easier to maintain.

The VxWorks support allowed much of the software running in the earlier system to be preserved.

As a result of the comprehensive UEI system, the navy was able to reduce maintenance time by 75%.