A Remote Laboratory in Engineering Measurement

Online engineering practice is offering nowadays new potentials for training of measurement technologies and experimental procedures. In a laboratory mainly devoted to instrumentation for measurement by hands-on activity in engineering fields, students and engineering professionals are using, at present, online experiments in a blended-learning approach. A set of experiments has been designed and developed as well as some virtual simulators. The experiments integrated in a Moodle platform are using a Web-server system based on LabVIEW 7.1, linked to them by data acquisition interface cards, a video server, and a booking system developed as an extension of the Moodle platform. This paper reports a particular setup specially designed for remotely measuring and determining mechanical material properties and its combination with the design of a highly interactive user interface. The user may remotely conduct the experiment, getting numerical, graphical, and live video output information and receiving e-mailed experimental results.