31-03-2012, 12:24 PM
Introducing Instrumentation and Data Acquisition to Mechanical Engineers using LabVIEW
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INTRODUCTION
LABORATORY WORK within university engineering
departments is expensive, both in terms of
the finance required to run laboratories and their
equipment, and in terms of staff and technician
time. This situation has been exacerbated in the
UK by the rapid recent increase in student
numbers. As a result, there has been a gradual
reduction in the exposure that students get in
experimentation, and a move towards simulation.
It is clear, however, that engineering students
should have knowledge of the role that experimentation
plays in modern engineering practice,
and engineering departments should expose
students to modern data acquisition techniques.
COURSE STRUCTURE AND CONTENT
The course has been developed to be flexible,
so that it can be followed by students with
different levels of experience and ability. The
target students are predominantly mechanical
engineering students, although students from
other engineering disciplines have also followed
the course. The focus is not on giving the students
a detailed knowledge of instrumentation, but
enabling them to understand the basic concepts,
and to give them a starting point for developing
the data acquisition systems and analysis procedures
they may need in their own project
work (or indeed, in future industrial or research
jobs).
In essence the students should:
. understand the underlying capabilities and
structure of a state-of-the-art PC-based data
acquisition system;
. be able to select and run existing library
programs for data gathering and analysis;
. be able to write or modify simple programs for
acquiring, processing and storing data.
Table 1 sets out the course structure in its most
commonly used formÐas an intensive one week
module.
DATA ACQUISITION DEMONSTRATION RIGS
An important element of the teaching is to show
modern data acquisition systems applied to a
variety of experimental configurations. Over the
last few years, a number of rigs have been developed,
or modified, to LabVIEW-based systems.
The following summarises the rigs demonstrated to
students.
CONCLUSIONS
The primary benefits that the authors have
perceived from standardising on common data
acquisition software (in this case, LabVIEW) are
as follows.
. Having a common software base means that
several academics can understand the data
acquisition programs, so the department is not
reliant on individuals.