Products Used
LabVIEW | CompactRIO
The Challenge
To develop a distributed long-term logging system for up to 30 simultaneous materials creep testing experiments for industrial partners.
The system needed to be flexible enough to allow individual experiments to be setup with a variable number of sensors – time between logging points to be varied throughout the test and the test to continue for up to several years without loss of data, even during power outages.
The Solution
The solution was developed using five National Instruments CompactRIO units networked to a single user PC running a LabVIEW application for test setup, monitoring and data download.
The CompactRIO units were chose for their industrial ruggedness and Real Time Operating system which will allow the tests to continue for several years without the need to reboot a Windows-based software solution. The Front end FPGA built into the CompactRIO allows for maximum flexibility in developing and tailoring the data acquisition system allowing it to cope with signals from sensors from the microvolt range (such as capacitance meters) to tens of volts (ie: LVDTs).
The modular design of the CompactRIO backplane allowed for changes to be made to the data acquisition requirements as the project progressed, by simply unplugging existing cRIO modules, and plugging in alternate units.
Austin Consultants Engineers built a Real-Time software solution which can be deployed to each CompactRIO to run independently. Each cRIO reports its current status back to the main PC software, also written in LabVIEW and presents it in a format allowing the user simple access to the Real Time data for up to thirty parallel tests to occur.
Each individual channel on the CompactRIO can be configured via the interactive Front Panel of the LabVIEW application, with visual prompts to show users where to plug in senors on the unit.
Sensor types encompass a range from thermocouples to LVDTs, so each channel configuration has to accurately match the signal type and range associated with it.
Each test is flexible enough to allow channel reconfiguration while the test is running, thus allowing test operators to swap in new sensors if any stop running during the duration of the test.
Test Configuration Interface
The test configuration interface, designed in LabVIEW, was made to provide two levels of user experience: Administrator and User.
Administrators have access to setup, run and configure tests, as well as view the data produced and download it.
Users only have access to view data acquired and download it, without the ability to change any parameters of the test running
The LabVIEW-based Front Panel allowed Austin Consultants rapid development of clear, graphical Windows based controls and clusters of controls.
