Virtual instrumentation for monitoring the purification installation of the cryogenic pilot plant by using remote data acquisition

The goal of this work was to develop a data acquisition system for the purifying module of the Pilot Plant for tritium and deuterium separation and acquire data over network using a National Instruments DAQ board AT-MIO-16XE-10 installed in a remote computer which is located in data acquisition room from tritium separation installation. This solution of implementation provides us with a large number of acquisitions, with many advantages from SCXI-signal conditioning. The gain is applied to the low-level signals from the SCXI module located close to the transducer, sending only high-level signals to the PC, minimizing the effects of noise on the readings. All data acquired are saved in specified files and after that are used to determine the thermodynamic parameters associated to each measuring point (entropy , enthalpy, specific heat, and occasionally, liquid fraction). With these values we analyze the performances of the compound units (heat exchangers, turbo expanders, throttle valves) of the cryogenics cycle using the temperature entropy diagram. We used the LabVIEW 4.1 TM programming for charting analyzing and saving data. The signal conditioning was chosen due to its advantages: electrical isolation transducers interfacing, signal amplification filtering and high speed channel multiplexing. (authors)