Designing a Virtual Instrument for Low Speed Tunnel Data Acquisition

A custom multi-piece aerodynamic balance for small unmanned air vehicle applications was designed and manufactured in the Military Technical Academy. It is a three-component strain gauge balance that employs the use of custommade load cells for data acquisition. The current paper focuses on the effort of the team to design an appropriate software environment for real time measurements and accurate data management. The virtual program collects and plots data from all the sensor cells offering as output non-dimensional force and moment coefficients.