Development of an automated data acquisition system for low speed air-intake studies

This paper presents the implementation aspects of an automated data acquisition system for low speed air-intake studies on aircraft models. The system has been developed at National Wind Tunnel Facility (NWTF), Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kanpur, (India) using virtual instrumentation technique and PXI (PCI eXtension for Instrumentation) architecture which enhances the productivity and reduces the cost through easy-to-integrate application software and PXI modular hardware. The application software of the system called virtual instrument has been developed using LabVIEW-based graphical development environment which enables the test engineer to configure the system easily to carry out air-intake studies for various intake aircraft configurations. The PXI architecture used for the system is very versatile and meets the specific needs of measurement and control applications by adding an integrated trigger bus and reference clock for multi-board synchronization. The system presented in this work has been used successfully for air-intake studies on various configurations of intake aircraft models.