Integrating computerized data acquisition and analysis into an undergraduate electric machines laboratory

The Ohio State University (OSU) Department of Electrical Engineering has maintained an electric machines laboratory in the undergraduate curriculum for many years. Safety has always been of paramount concern and therefore instrumentation and measurement procedures must be developed so as to allow safe operation of the equipment over a wide range of experimental tests Hall-effect voltage and current transducers have been incorporated into the test table, the output of which goes to an A/D converter in a PC. The software used to accomplish the data acquisition and subsequent analysis is LabVIEW by National Instruments. Using the many tools provided by LabVIEW a program was developed that gives the srudent freedom to decide what variables to record, how to analyze those variables and how to display them.