Instrumentations Lab

Director: Dr. Mert Bal

Locations: Hamilton Campus: Phelps Hall, PHE 100 & PHE 300

The Instrumentations Lab offers a variety of laboratory equipment that is utilized in design and development of electromechanical instrumentations systems for measurement and analysis of solid mechanical quantities, speed, position, and torque measurements, and pressure, temperature and flow measurements. The lab is mainly utilized by the Computerized Instrumentation (ENT401) course.

The equipment in the instrumentation lab is also used for building and testing various electrical-signal conditioning systems, data acquisition and other electronics interfacing systems such as amplifiers, multiplexers and filters.

Each kit belongs to a laboratory project and contains a set of equipment and parts that are used by the students to design, build and test lab project hardware in order to perform experimentation. Typically these laboratory projects are carried out by groups of 2-4 students. Each student group is provided a lab kit to do the laboratory project of the course.

Major Lab kits

Encoder-Tachometer Lab Project Kit

  • 4-speed crank axle gearbox
  • Encoder Stand
  • Scotch sticky back pads

Accelerometer Lab Project Kit

  • DE-ACCM3D accelerometer chip and breadboard
  • 9 Volt battery with battery connector

Straub Gauge Lab Project Kit

  • Strain Gauge Unit with Cantilever Beam Setup
  • 330 ohm resistors
  • 1KOhm Potentiometer

Affinity Law of Pumps Lab Project Kit

  • Water Pump
  • Bourdon Gauge
  • Rotameter Flowmeter
  • Bucket and Clear plastic tubes and pipe fittings

Common Equipment

The common equipment in this lab is used for building and testing of various interfacing and instrumentation lab projects listed above.

  • Microcontroller Boards (CUBLOC & Arduino)
  • DC Power supply units
  • Digital Multimeters with RS-232 Interface
  • Breadboards, switches and other small electronics components

Software used in Instrumentation Lab Projects

Each laboratory project has a software and programming component. The following software applications are used in order to complement the experiments performed in this lab.

  • Microsoft Visual Studio
  • Microsoft Excel
  • Matlab Simulink
  • CUBLOC Studio
  • Arduino IDE