Seeking Feedback: What Would You Design, Test or Build with a Thermocouple Measurement System from National Instruments?

RE: Seeking Feedback: What Would You Design, Test or Build with a Thermocouple Measurement System from National Instruments?

doug65 — Mon, 04 Oct 2021 12:01:16 GMT

I would like to add this to a test bench that we already have working.

We build Heat exchangers and the bench I would like to add monitoring to actually does Internal Corrosion test.

The part is in an enclosed chamber with no air flow. I would like to be able to monitor the Heat Transfer rate in the enclosed chamber and compare against the results from the Heat Transfer Wind Tunnel. Even though we do tests with no induced air flow, there is still some heat transfer caused from air movement in the area of the test.

RE: Seeking Feedback: What Would You Design, Test or Build with a Thermocouple Measurement System from National Instruments?

dougw — Mon, 04 Oct 2021 00:45:22 GMT

This is a neat set of instrumentation to measure temperature. I like the little chassis, which avoids a big rack.

I built a system that can measure 4 thermocouples, so I'm not sure I need this instrumentation, but here are some Ideas for road testing ...

In the past I was involved in things like measuring the effect of fuel temperature on internal combustion engine efficiency.(Should you pre-heat the fuel and if so, how much?)
In the case of a home furnace, does inlet fuel temperature make a difference to flame temperature?
In the case of a Stirling engine, which is notoriously inefficient, where is all the heat wasted?
In the case of a hot water heater, is it worth adding an electric heater at the tap, to get instant hot water, instead of running the water until hot water from the tank gets to the tap?
In the case of solar blinds, how much energy do they save?
In the case of various heatsink systems for Raspberry Pi's, which one does the best job?

RE: Seeking Feedback: What Would You Design, Test or Build with a Thermocouple Measurement System from National Instruments?

kmikemoo — Sun, 03 Oct 2021 15:24:16 GMT

4 inputs... Test the efficiency of an engine block heater system. Given that we're moving into colder weather here in North America, keeping emergency backup generator engines ready to start and take load - it's kind of an important thing.

The four values: Ambient, heater discharge, engine coolant (block), return coolant. It would be best to tie this to charting current (heater) draw as well.

The next step up for these systems is a circulating pump instead of their normal convection circulation. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Other options:

Functionality of radiator systems: Most of the radiators I work on are both engine coolant (liquid) and charge air (air-to-air). Test inlet and return on both for 0, 30, 50, 75 and 100 % load.

Combustion air system: Ambient, cylinder intake air, charge air before the charge air cooler, and exhaust. Test at 0, 30, 50, 75 and 100 percent loads.

*30, 50 and 75 percent loads are mandated load testing levels for required emergency systems at hospitals, fire stations, life safety applications, etc. in the US.

RE: Seeking Feedback: What Would You Design, Test or Build with a Thermocouple Measurement System from National Instruments?

DAB — Sat, 02 Oct 2021 18:24:51 GMT

I have heard about the NI HW and SW, but I never had a chance to actually use it for an application.

I would really like to see real examples of its use, usability, and flexibility for setting up automated testing capability.

DAB

RE: Seeking Feedback: What Would You Design, Test or Build with a Thermocouple Measurement System from National Instruments?

shabaz — Sat, 02 Oct 2021 13:30:50 GMT

Interesting product..

This could be quite handy for machine learning tasks, if it were attached to (say) a Raspberry Pi or some other low-power machine, and then just capture tons of temperature data over a week within a room.. and either use something like a PIR sensor directly attached to the Pi, or attach a circuit to misuse one of the temperature channels to receive the PIR sensor events - or use any input on the cDAQ chassis - it wasn't entirely clear but maybe it might have a bit of I/O on the chassis.

Then, you've got a nice dataset for training, for classifying the presence or absence of humans, purely on temperature fluctuations.

Ideally in a real-life situation you'd want several of these units and several Pi's to perform the acquisition in multiple locations over long periods to start getting get lots of diverse data quickly.

Another use-case would be schools/uni (or actually any mobile use).. attached to a tablet or mobile phone, this could be used for experiments/measurements indoors or outdoors. No idea what the USB protocol is though, and if there is already any mobile app for it. This would probably need the support of NI to make it happen, depends how willing they are to share the protocol detail to allow the app development. But maybe they've already thought of this and implemented a sample mobile app.

The environmental info in the datasheet actually looks good but it states for indoor use only. However I'm sure it could be easily ruggedised slightly and be more suitable for outdoor use,within a backpack or other sort of bag/case. If they have not already thought of it, I'm sure there's bound to be business cases for having one version of chassis designed to be more ruggedised, or even a leather case with strap or something, with space for the phone/tablet.

RE: Seeking Feedback: What Would You Design, Test or Build with a Thermocouple Measurement System from National Instruments?

Gough Lui — Sat, 02 Oct 2021 05:41:01 GMT

Wouldn't be bad to monitor different regions of a fridge/freezer ... or a computer, power supply or other electronics where they generate heat and have multiple heatsinks.

Another application might perhaps be in conjunction with testing soldering irons by instrumenting a copper plane with thermocouples and watching how the heat spreads over time.

- Gough

RE: Seeking Feedback: What Would You Design, Test or Build with a Thermocouple Measurement System from National Instruments?

fpobdoc — Sat, 02 Oct 2021 03:21:28 GMT

I do a lot of work with exothermic reactions and need to measure ambient and substrate reaction temperature, alarm for over-temperature states, and record parameters to adjust for future runs. This would be a great platform to control, measure, and record data.

RE: Seeking Feedback: What Would You Design, Test or Build with a Thermocouple Measurement System from National Instruments?

neuromodulator — Sat, 02 Oct 2021 00:31:37 GMT

I like NI products, they offer a whole ecosystem of measurement hardware and software solutions. I would love to see a design competition / special project / roadtest where participants could select a few modules to build a measuring or control system. I think this would highlight the flexibility of the cDAQ/RIO system in terms of the wide variety of modules that can be used together, and the flexibility of the software (LabVIEW, libraries, etc).

RE: Seeking Feedback: What Would You Design, Test or Build with a Thermocouple Measurement System from National Instruments?

eriklinell — Fri, 01 Oct 2021 19:49:29 GMT

Thank you! We'd love to see some unique applications. Also, there are other configurations if more measurements are required!