Data compression by an accordion unit

In neutron time-of-flight spectrometry, the neutron energy uncertainty is proportional to Δt/t where Δt is the time-of-flight uncertainty and t is the time-of-flight.

This means that in most experiments the channel width of the time-of-flight analyser is allowed to increase with longer time-of-flight values without a reduction of the resolution.

Therefore a so-called accordion unit performing this function can considerably reduce the necessary handling and processing time of the experimental data.

The input words of 21 bit length can be compressed to 16 bit output words. The user can program the accordion unit by means of a CRT-terminal for 8 variable zones with optional compression factors up to 1024. The hardware is based on an Intel-8086 16 bit μ-processor system.