The application of fieldbus technology to the automatic control of quality and costs in environmental simulation test laboratories

When a modern factory plans to automate an industrial process, it must solve a common problem: to centralize all the signals from/to the installed sensors/actuators in only one control computer if they are distributed by the factory plant. This is especially critical for environmental simulation test laboratories. In these laboratories, pieces and critical units of a device suffer environmental simulated conditions into a set of test chambers distributed by the laboratory plant. The automatic real-time tracking of all the conditions that those units suffer is a pressing need in order to supply a laboratory's customers with detailed information about the tests and to guarantee their quality. The dispersion of the data sources (test chambers) makes the traditional data acquisition techniques useless. The solution for supervising and controlling distributed processes comes up with a day by day emerging technology: the fieldbus.