Remote Control and Supervision of the Relative Humidity Standards of Colombia

[Marco Amorim]

Contact Information

University and Department:

Universidad Distrital Francisco José de Caldas

Electronic Engineering Departamet

Team Members:

Diego Ernesto Ballén Cantor

Faculty Advisors:

Luis Alfredo Chavarro- Humidity Laboratory Manager

Primary Email Address: ballen@correo.sic.gov.co

Primary Telephone Number: +57 (3)  54 28  ext. 3402

Project Information

Parts used to design and complete project:

LabVIEW 8.5.1

LabVIEW PDA module 8.5.1

Describe the challenge your project is trying to solve:

The Superintendencia de Industria y Comercio by law preserves and maintains the Colombian national standards of measurement, including the quantity of humidity (see Figure 1). The humidity laboratory has the legal responsibility of disseminating traceability to the units of the International System through calibration of instruments that measure this quantity.

In this field, the National Standard consists of a two pressures Humidity Generator and a Shilled Mirror Hygrometer. The calibration process consists of a comparison of the values given by the humidity generator and that value indicated by the instrument under calibration at certain points of relative humidity. This comparison is made when the entire described system achieves its stability conditions.

The collected data is processed using complex spreadsheet based on Microsoft Excel to determine the errors of the instrument with respect to the standards, as well as uncertainties associated with the measurements. The process culminates with the storage of a spreadsheet of each instrument and the issue of a certificate which is given to the customer with the results of the calibration. All these tasks are currently performed by hand with the additional problem that these equipments are noisy and the temperature in the calibration location tends to increase.

The team wanted to allow remote monitoring and control of the national standards of humidity, with the following objectives:

     1. Process optimization for calibration of instruments that measure this quantity

     2. Getting remote access to the Colombian standards of humidity from anywhere in the world, via Internet, so that theoretical and practical training (national or international) that are received or issued at this magnitude can make use of this equipment

     3. Minimize the possibility of including measurement errors attributable to the observer in the process of measurement and calibration

How the team addressed the challenge through the project:

Remotely control the standards (change set point values and start and suspend operation), supervise them and calibrate the devices using a local (near to the standards)  and a remote application having them communicated through a TCP connection. Besides develop a PDA application that also communicates with the local one and allows user to control and supervise the primary standards