Thermal Vacuum Chamber DAQ and Control
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Based on several successful deliveries of complex DAQ systems, WinSoft was selected by 2 major satellite manufacturers to design and build a DAQ and Control systems which are connected to various thermal vacuum chambers - all connected to a central database.
The chambers are used for environmental testing. The data collected by the DAQ system is recorded continuously every few seconds over a period of a few months. |
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The challenge
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Designing a system that would monitor over few thousands temperature sensors telemetry and command signals of various types, perform additional user-defined calculations, provide real-time control of few hundreds heaters based on any of those temperature readings or user calculations, store the acquired data and status information, and display the results in a highly configurable GUI.
Hundreds of PID loops would be needed to run in parallel. Tens of different windows with various graphical and images display were available to the operator to use in real time. Several of these systems should be running independently while acquiring and sending data to a central database. |
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The solution
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The system was comprised of a real-time PXI terminal and several SCXI chasses for data acquisition and control, a server PC for data storage, communication, and user access management, and multiple client PCs for display and user interface. WinSoft used LabVIEW Real-Time, along with the PID Toolkit to implement the control algorithm. Several SCXI modules route the sensor inputs to PXI modules in order to provide high-speed acquisition of all the various sensor types. By using National Instruments hardware along with LabVIEW, WinSoft was able to deliver a high-channel-count system with excellent measurement speed and accuracy. Additionally, WinSoft used NI Requirements Gateway to capture and trace the requirements implementation.
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