A manufacturing company in Markham, Toronto builds commercial refrigerators and freezers that make up a large lineup of products that are catered to the food and beverage industry.
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Problem:
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An important component of the operations of this manufacturing plant was their R&D lab. In this lab, engineering concepts and ideas were conceived, engineering prototypes were experimented and final products were tested and certified.
In every test, for every product, whether for certification or as part of the design process, a large number of physical phenomenon needed to be measured, recorded and graphed so that the results could be then analyzed or reported to the certification agencies. For every test tens of transducers needed to be used to measure physical phenomenon such as temperature, pressure, voltage, current, electrical energy consumption and air velocity.
At last, a very capable (in terms of accuracy and processing speed) stationary data logging network made up of data acquisition hardware, variety of sensors, power sources, software and an interface was needed such that this system could ultimately take and record all the measurements.
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Challenges:
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This project also had its own unique challenges: a specific ASHRAE Energy Star test that applies to the commercial reach-in refrigeration industry. As part of this specific Energy Star test, a refrigerator had to be filled with test bottles with their temperatures being recorded by thermocouples. For a period of 8 hours, every 10 minutes, the refrigerator's door had to be fully opened, remained opened for 6 seconds and then closed. The electrical energy consumption of the refrigerator had to be recorded the entire time while the average test bottle temperature had to remain below a certain limit.The challenge was that at this manufacturing company there were no means of performing this test automatically which aside from causing frustration wasted a lot of employee time.
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Solution:
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Work was started by conceiving the right hardware selection taking into account the number and type of sensors, processing speed requirements, accuracy and etc. National Instruments equipment were chosen due to their PC-based style, hardware capability and HMI design tools. All the hardware and wiring between the NI equipment, power sources and transducers were completed. Next, programming the software and the interface were completed to ensure the system can both communicate with all the various transducers and lab technicians can start and stop tests and view the live data being recorded.
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A custom made electrical panel was built and custom connection bezels specific to the transducers being used were installed in the panel. All the wiring from the electrical panel to the data logging station located outside the chamber were also completed. And the data logger was programmed such that on the desktop interface with a click of a button the real time data from different physical phenomenon from every unit under test could be graphed and logged.
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An automated system made up of an air compressor, actuators, solenoids and NI relay modules was designed and commissioned to automate opening the refrigerator's door as prescribed by the aforementioned Energy star test.
