DAC Format

nCode International created the DAC file format. This DAC format supports single-parameter (time series), two-parameter (x-y), and three-parameter (histogram) files. Adams Durability supports the time series format. With this DAC format, you can input data from durability test machines and output data to nSoft and other DAC-compatible programs. This topic contains an overview of the DAC format. For a detailed description of the DAC format, see the nSoft data File Formats document from nCode International.

DAC files are binary, sequential, and fixed-length with 512-byte records. The data represent a fixed sample rate or time step. Real numbers are single-precision (4-byte) values. Each file has header, data, and footer regions. Adams Durability supports both old (pre version 5.0) and new (version 5.0+) DAC formats with a single channel of time series data.

In general, DAC files are not portable from platform to platform. For example, files created by Adams Durability on a Windows platform are not readable by Adams Durability or other programs on Linux platforms. nCode provides an nSoft utility to convert DAC files from one platform to another. However, this utility does not have a specification for the Linux platform. When using Adams Durability or Adams View on a Linux platform, use DAC files that have been converted to Windows or INTEL (Windows DAC files are compatible with Linux). Note that Linux-generated DAC files can be processed on Windows and the reverse.