LabVIEW projects - Oxygen Stripping

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Automated measurements on a packed bed reactor

In a packed bed reactor oxygen (in air) will be used as oxydizer. The packing in the reactor can be changed between tests and during the tests both the gas and liquid flow can be changed; all in order to find the best set of conditions.

The hardware

The presented vi connects to a variety of hardware to measure and/or control a variety of process values, e.g.:

an Ocean Optics Spectrometer; measures the oxygen level,

a Sartorius scale; measures the weight of the column.

a Brooks mass flow controller; controls (and measures) the gas flow,

Advantech 4000 modules; connect to other sensors and actuators.

Principle

The basic principle of the vi is that there is a loop for each type of hardware. These loops run concurrently together with a loop to store the measured data, once the operator has pressed the designated button.

Extensions

The basic principle has been extended with two special modes of operation.

The first special mode is the possiblity to measure pressures at the highest possible speed. Since the pressure measurenments are collected with the ADAM modules, all other values that are collected with the ADAM modules will be skipped for the duration of this mode. Furthermore the oxygen measurement loop will bypass the actual measurement for the duration of this mode because of it's known interference (in terms of timing) on other loops.
The second special mode is the possibility to run a recipe that will change both the gas and liquid flow and will store data after a given stabilization time. Two loops, one to handle events (like 'Start'/'Stop' recipe) and one to process the recipe steps, were introduced. The original vi was unchanged leaving the ability to operate the vi manually.

Utilities

This project applies a few different types of hardware elements. To test the functionality of each of these hardware elements a set of small utilities has been created. Furthermore a menu to enable the operator to select either one of this utilities or the main program has been added.