INTELLIGENT VIRTUAL CONTROL:MEASURING INSTRUMENT FROM WHOLE TO PART

A new concept called intelligent virtual control (IVC), which can be drivenby measuring functions, is put forward. This small 'intelligent measurement instrument unit (IMIU)',carrying with functions of instrument, consists of different types of intelligent virtualinstrument (IVI) through individual components together as building blocks and can be displayeddirectly on the computer screen. This is a new concept of measuring instrument, and also animportant breakthrough after virtual instrument (VI). Virtual control makes instrument resourcesobtain further exploitation. It brings about a fundamental change to the design and manufacturingmode. The instrument therefore, can not only be produced directly inside a PC, but the product isinvolved in the 'green product' system. So far, all the present digital instruments will grow to bereplaced by intelligent control with green characteristics.

DEVELOPMENT OF VIRTUAL INSTRUMENT IN CHARACTERISTIC ANALYSIS OF ROTATING MACHINERY BASED ON INSTANTANEOUS FREQUENCY ESTIMATION

Based on the recently quick-developing time-frequency analysis (TFA)technique and virtual instrument (VI) technique, a virtual instrument in characteristic analysis ofrotating machinery is researched and developed successfully. By utilizing instantaneous frequencyestimation (IFE) theoretics of TFA technique, and based on IFE of peak searching on thetime-frequency spectrum, order analysis (OA) functions is put forward and implemented, such as orderspectrum, order spectrum matrix, order tracking, order tracking filtering, and order componentextraction, etc. Unlike the home and abroad existing popular characteristic analyzers, which needkey phasing devices such as shaft encoder, phase-locked loop (PLL), phase-locked multiple frequency,tachometer, etc, to implement constant angle sampling directly or indirectly, whereas thisinstrument only uses the vibration signal of rotating machinery to carry out OA. This instrumentmakes up the shortage of these traditional instruments in analyzing the non-stationary signal ofrun-up and run-down process of rotating machinery. Therefore, it is a great breakthrough for theexisting order analyzers.

Design of Onboard Instrument Based on Virtual Instrument Technology

After analyzing and comparing the traditional automobile instrument,the onboard instrument based on virtual instrument technology is designed in this paper.The PC/104 computer was employed as the core processing unit of the onbaard in- strument,and the several intelligent data acquisition nodes are set and connected by the CAN bus,through which the nodes can com- municate with the core processing unit.The information of the vehicle’s working condition can be displayed synthetically by adopt- ing virtual instrument technology.When the working condition goes beyond its limit,the system can emit an alarm,record and storage the abnormal condition automatically,and suggest how to deal with the abnormity urgently.The development background and design idea of onboard information system were elaborated in the paper.The software,the hardware architecture and the principle of onboard information system were introduced in detail.

V–L decomposition of a novel full-waveform lidar system based on virtual instrument technique

A novel three-dimensional（3D） imaging lidar system which is based on a virtual instrument technique is introduced in this paper. The main characteristics of the system include： the capability of modeling a 3D object in accordance with the actual one by connecting to a geographic information system（GIS）, and building the scene for the lidar experiment including the simulation environment. The simulation environment consists of four parts： laser pulse, atmospheric transport,target interaction, and receiving unit. Besides, the system provides an interface for the on-site experiment. In order to process the full waveform, we adopt the combination of pulse accumulation and wavelet denoising for signal enhancement.We also propose an optimized algorithm for data decomposition： the V-L decomposition method, which combines Vondrak smoothing and laser-template based fitting. Compared with conventional Gaussian decomposition, the new method brings an improvement in both precision and resolution of data decomposition. After applying V-L decomposition to the lidar system, we present the 3D reconstructed model to demonstrate the decomposition method.

LabVIEW-based auto-timing counts virtual instrument system with ORTEC 974 Counter/Timer

In order to achieve the auto-timing counts measurement of nuclear radiation using ORTEC 974 Counter/Timer, an auto-timing counts virtual instrument system based on the LabVIEW virtual instrument development platform and GPIB instrument control and transmission bus protocol is designed in this paper. By introducing software timing technique, the minimum time base of factory setting improves from 0.1 s to 0.03 s. The timing counts performance and longtime stability are also discussed in detail. The automatic data recording and saving facilitates data analysis and processing. Its real-time display and statistic function is very convenient for monitoring the nuclear radiation.

Virtual instrument for controlling and monitoring digitalized power supply in SSRF

The Shanghai Synchrotron Radiation Facility (SSRF) needs extremely precise power supplies for their various magnets. A digital controller is being developed for the power converters of the SSRF power supply (PS). In the digital controller, a fully digital pulse-width modulator (PWM) directly controls the power unit insulated gate bipolar transistor (IGBT) of the PS. A program in LabVIEW language has been developed to control and monitor the digital PS via serial communication (RS232) from a PC and to modify its parameters as well. In this article, the software design of the virtual instrument for controlling and monitoring digitalized PS and its associated functions are described, and the essential elements of the program graphical main-VI and sub-VI source code are presented and explained. The com- munication protocol and the structure of the developed system are also included in this article.

Feature Extraction and Diagnosis System Using Virtual Instrument Based on CI

Through investigating intelligent diagnosis method of Computational Intelligence (CI) and studying its application in fault feature extraction, a gear fault detection and Virtual Instrument Diagnostic System is developed by using the two hybrid programming method which combines both advantages of VC++ and MATLAB. The interface is designed by VC++ and the calculation of test data, signal processing and graphical display are completed by MATLAB. The pro-gram converted from M-file to VC++ is completed by interface software, and a various multi-functional gear fault di-agnosis software system is successfully obtained. The software system, which has many functions including the intro-duction of gear vibration signals, signal processing, graphical display, fault detection and diagnosis, monitoring and so on, especially, the ability of diagnosing gear faults. The method has an important application in the field of mechanical fault diagnosis.

Virtual instrument for monitoring process of brush plating

A virtual instrument(Ⅵ) was developed to monitor the technological parameters in the process of brush plating, including coating thickness, brush-plating current, current density, deposition rate, and brush plating voltage. Meanwhile two approaches were presented to improve the measurement accuracy of coating thickness. One of them aims at eliminating the random interferences by moving average filtering; while the other manages to calculate the quantity of electricity consumed accurately with rectangular integration. With these two approaches, the coating thickness can be measured in real time with higher accuracy than the voltage-frequency conversion method. During the process of plating all the technological parameters are displayed visually on the front panel of the Ⅵ. Once brush current or current density overruns the limited values, or when the coating thickness reaches the objective value, the virtual will alarm. With this Ⅵ, the solution consumption can be decreased and the operating efficiency is improved.

A Method for Modeling the Virtual Instrument Automatic Test System Based on the Petri Net

Virtual instrument is playing the important role in automatic test system. This paper introduces a composition of a virtual instrument automatic test system and takes the VXIbus based a test software platform which is developed by CAT lab of the UESTC as an example. Then a method to model this system based on Petri net is proposed. Through this method, we can analyze the test task scheduling to prevent the deadlock or resources conflict. At last, this paper analyzes the feasibility of this method.

Virtual Instrument System for Teaching Lab

Virtual Instruments, which have the most brilliant prospect in the domain of instruments, are the combination of the computers and traditional instruments. According to the constructions and the characters of the Teaching Lab Instruments, the paper introduces the principle and design of Virtual Instrument System. Meanwhile, a practical application is indicated.

Automatic measurement of the working band of a digital attenuator based on virtual instrument

To measure the working band of a digital attenuator automatically,a program based on virtual instrument was carried out,using Agilent E8362B network analyzer as its measuring tool.In the program,the attenuation values can be automatically written into Excel table to form the frequency-attenuation curve.Finally,through analyzing the attenuation in different frequency,the best working band of the digital attenuator can be determined easily,and the whole process is automated.Compared with the traditional way of changing the measured parameters manually and recording the measured data one by one,the developed method in the paper can avoid the cumbersome manual operation and its possible errors to improve the measurement accuracy and efficiency.

Ventilator performance evaluation system based on virtual instruments

A virtual instrument system is proposed to test the performance parameters of local-ventilator installed under coal mines,which can do ventilator parameter acquisition automatically,as well as plot and analyze the ventilator performance curve.The whole system is designed using the virtual instrument technology combined with network technology based on Labview platform.Experimental results show that it can monitor and evaluate ventilator’s performance parameters automatically and efficiently,which provides critical information for ventilator safety under coal mine.

The engine performance LabVIEW virtual instrument test system design

This paper adopts American National Instruments (NI) Company’s LabVIEW and LabVIEW RT virtual instrument softwareplatform and lots of things for this engine performance LabVIEW virtual instrument test system, such as the matched NI PCI dataCollection Card, NI SCXI signal-adjusting instrument and NI compact FieldPoint (cFP) distributed I/O real time system hardware.This system has realized multi performances’parallel test; and it can complete load, torsional moment, rotate speed, power, pressureand temperature’s real time monitoring automatically according to user’s setting; and finally through TCP/IP protocol it realizes testdata’s teleshare and telecontrol that user put on the test system. This system has such character as short development period, highuse efficiency and low cost, at the same time it has strong extensibility and reusability, so it has very high applied cost.

Reconstruction Model of Ocean Observing Complex Virtual Instrument

With the newly proposed Global Ocean Observing Integration, ocean observing scope has been expanded from the region to the global, therefore the need of large-scale ocean observing system integration has become more and more urgent. Currently, ocean observing systems enabled ocean sensor networks are commonly developed by different organizations using specific technologies and platforms, which brings several challenges in ocean observing instrument （OOI） access and ocean observing system seamless integration. Furthermore, the development of ocean observing systems often suffers from low efficiency due to the complex prograrmning and debugging process. To solve these problems, a novel model, Complex Virtual Instrument （CVI） Model, is proposed. The model provides formal definitions on observing instrument description file, CVI description file, model calculation method, development model and interaction standard. In addition, this model establishes mathematical expressions of two model calculation operations, meanwhile builds the mapping relationship between observing instrument description file and CVI description file. The CVI based on the new model can achieve automatic access to different OOIs, seamless integration and communication for heterogeneous environments, and further implement standardized data access and management for the global unified ocean observing network. Throughout the development, integration and application of such CVI, the rationality and feasibility of the model have been evaluated. The results confirm that the proposed model can effectively implement heterogeneous system integration, improve development efficiency, make full usage of reusable components, reduce development cost, and enhance overall software system quality. We believe that our new model has great significance to promote the large-scale ocean observing system integration.

MEMS Test System Based on Virtual Instrument Technology

On account of the multiformity of MEMS devices, it is necessary to integrate with some optical measurement techniques for meeting static and dynamic unit test requirements. In this paper, an automated MEMS test system is built of some commercially available components and instruments based on virtual instrument technology. The system is integrated with stroboscopic imaging, computer micro-vision, microscopic Mirau phase shifting interferometry, and laser Doppler vibrometer, and is used for the measurement of full-view in-plane and out-of-plane geometric parameters and periodical motions and single spot out-of-plane transient motion. The system configuration and measurement methods are analyzed, and some applications of the measurement of in-plane and out-of-plane dimensions and motions were described. The measurement accuracy of in-plane dimensions and out-of-plane dimensional is better than 0.2 um and 5 nm respectively. The resolution of measuring in-plane and out-of-plane motions is better than 15 nm and 2 nm respectively.

Parameter Test of ROIC for IRFPA Based on Virtual Instrument Technology

The readout integrated circuit (ROIC) technology is one of the critical technologies in the research of an infrared focal plane array (IRFPA). Based on the virtual instrument technology, a system for parameter test of ROIC is developed for IRFPA. The complex programmable logic device (CPLD) is applied into the system to increase its flexibility. With high reliability and precision, along with the integrated software and hardware environment, the system can test all kinds of ROICs.

Design of Arbitrary Waveform Generator Based on Virtual Instrument Technology

A desiga of arbitrary waveform generator using NI PXI- 5412 module （an arbitrary waveform generator） was provided in this paper, based on virtual instrument technology and LabVIEW. The generator can produce standard function waveforms, such as sine, triangle, square wave with adjustable amplitude and frequency. It can also produce arbitrary waveforms of different data files importing by Analog Waveform Geaemtor Software. A heart dectric wavefonn was set as an example of arbitrary waveform generation. It has practical value, because the standard functions and heart electric waveforms generated by the generator can be used in laboratories.

Testing System Based on Virtual Instrument for Readout Circuit of Infrared Focal Plane Array

Readout integrated circuit(ROIC) is one of the most important components for hybrid-integrated infrared focal plane array(IRFPA). And it should be tested to ensure the product yield before bonding. This paper presents an on-wafer testing system based on Labview for ROIC of IRFPA. The quantitative measurement can be conducted after determining whether there is row crosstalk or not in this system. This low-cost system has the benefits of easy expansion, upgrading, and flexibility, and it has been employed in the testing of several kinds of IRFPA ROICs to measure the parameters of saturated output voltage, non-uniformity, dark noise and dynamic range, etc.