Instrumentation & Controls Laboratories

These two laboratory facilities house the equipment used to support teaching ETME 3251 -Instrumentation and Controls Laboratory and ELET 2241L – Instrumentation Laboratory. The Electrical/Electronics Laboratory (Smith 326) is a general purpose laboratory primarily used for circuit analysis and design. The Programmable Logic Controllers (PLC) laboratory (Smith353) houses the equipment mostly dedicated to discrete-state control.

The Electrical/Electronics Laboratory use has been extended beyond its traditional role of generating, measuring displaying and recording signals from electrical/electronic circuits. This laboratory is now intensively used for building and testing of signal conditioning circuits, instrumentation, computer-based communication with instruments, data acquisition and physical system control, using principally National Instrument Data Acquisition devices and LabView software. The nine workstations in this laboratory each contain the following equipment: a Tektronix TDS 2002B 60MHz Dual Channel Digital Storage Oscilloscope, a Hitachi V-212 Analog Oscilloscope, a Rigol DG-1022 20MHz 2-Channel Function Generator, EZ FG-8002 2MHz Analog Function Generator, an Agilent E3630A Triple Output Power Supply, an HP E3612A DC Power Supply, an Agilent 34401A Digital Bench Multimeter, a Tenma 72-7925 Digital Multimeter, a OTE DM-568C Digital Handheld Multimeter, a Protek 9PK-386Analog Handheld Multimeter, and an NI A/D SC 7075 board. Global Specialties PB-503 Protoboards, K & H breadboards, National Instruments SC-2075Data Acquisition Platform, Tenma Resistance decade boxes 72-7270 and Tenma Capacitance decade boxes 72-7265 are also available for use in the laboratory. A printer and two fully networked Mosaic PCs are available in the laboratory, along with eight stand-alone Dell PCs with a National Instruments SC-7075 A/D board, LabView and productivity software.

The PLC Lab is basically used for an introduction to Relay Logic and PLC control. Ladder Logic programs, written to meet specific requirements, are transferred to PLC to control motors, pumps, solenoid valve, lights, buzzers, bells and alarms from a variety of digital inputs. The equipment in this laboratory includes 10 PLC Training Stations PTS T100, 10 Dell PC with TRiLOGI ladder logic software, 1 custom designed and fabricated Water Transfer System unit, 18 custom designed and fabricated PLC Trainer Boards, 1 SamSung UF-80ST digital Presenter.