Automation Control of Thermal Conductivity Measurement Process Based on LabVIEW

An automation control program based on LabVIEW is designed to measure thermal conductivity of phase change material (PCM). The program is composed of file storage function of all test data and calculation results, temperature-controlled with only one heating plate or both heating plates, NI-DAQ-based data acquisition system, and steady state judgment system. During the testing procedure, the setting temperature is transmitted to heat plates while real-time parameters are read to the computer by using the Modbus protocol. When the temperature reach to stable state determined by the program automatically, the thermal conductivity of PCM is measured. The development of this automatic control program can realize the automatic test of thermal conductivity, and obtain the variation of temperatures and heat fluxes to research the phase change process in the future.