Case Studies

Basic Custom DAQ and Analyzer in LabVIEW

Posted in Embedded Development & Programming, Food and Beverage, LabVIEW, Manufacturing Automation and Intelligence, Product Development, Test & Measurement Automation

Summary

In the process of designing a comprehensive End of Line (EOL) tester for a rapidly approaching product launch, DMC was asked to quickly design a very basic lab tester for the same UUT (Unit Under Test). DMC was ready to implement their custom software and ordered hardware within two days of the initial proposal. 

Solution

The unit under design was supposed to carbonate any beverage that was put into its vessel. DMC was near completion of the EOL tester that was going to replace the manual testing of carbonation levels (which actually carbonated chilled water and then measured the pressure in a separate perturbed/shaken, closed vessel). Early on in this test stand design DMC verified that acceleration levels of the unit's vessel during carbonation was a good indicator of the resulting beverage's carbonation. Since the client's current method of measuring carbonation varied heavily from test to test, collecting accurate results on a newly designed unit took a lot of time.

To speed up their verification of design changes, DMC was asked to make a basic DAQ system and analysis tool. DMC ordered the same hardware used for measuring acceleration on the EOL tester and wrote a basic state machine to complete the data acquisition, framing, and analysis with fully functional file control and engineering parameter editing. The client is now able to immediately see repeatable and accurate acceleration results that indicate their product's carbonation ability.

Customer Benefits

  • A rapidly designed tabletop tester capable of collecting and analyzing acceleration data of a pressurized vessel.
  • Customer able to get data on their product  within two days.
  • No delay in product design.
  • DMC delivered functional software that was within the small project scope.

Technologies

  • NI 9178 (cDAQ)
  • NI 9234 (acceleration I/O card)
  • 50 g accelerometer
  • LabVIEW