Track: Global Engineering Education

Abstract

With the advent of interactive multimedia programming languages and world-wide-web (www), it has now become possible to develop virtual laboratories that can be accessed globally. Experiment-oriented problems may be offered without the overhead incurred on comprehensive hardware workshop or laboratory. Based on these considerations, the present paper reports the development of a novel Virtual Instrument (VI) for monitoring process parameters. The proposed VI can also serve as an excellent educational tool as well. This is designed using object-oriented, fourth-generation programming technology. The executed user-interactive VI ensures efficient data acquisition, management and presentation. It is developed as an integrated system using five different Virtual Instruments (Sub-VIs). Each of the five Sub-VIs, was executed as a standalone Virtual Instrument for a particular application. The dedicated VIs were integrated to execute the proposed VI for different applications of transducer modeling. These applications include estimation of nonlinearity of transducers, transducer linearization, self-compensation in transducers and fault detection in transducer based systems. Such applications are frequently required in Data Acquisition System (DAS) connected transducers. In order to evaluate the performance of the proposed VI, Data Acquisition Based pressure transducer has been chosen in the present work because these transducers find wide applications in process control.