WP2: Development of an open software tool

Partners involved: INRIM (WP Leader), CMI, FER, JV, LNE, Metrosert, SIQ, RISE (SP), TUBITAK.

The aim of this work package is to develop an open software tool suitable for handling the high performance and precise state-of-the-art sampling systems (analogue-to-digital converters (ADCs)) identified for power and PQ measurements. In particular the software tool will be: i) able to identify the sampling hardware equipment - to interact with the experimental modular measurement setup, and to ensure a direct means for the simultaneous sampling of waveforms from voltage and current transducers employed in the modular measurement setup and ii) provide fast and transparent calculation of power and PQ parameters and their associated uncertainties.

Due to the diversity of hardware platforms (NI 5922 digitizers and the sampling DMM 3458As) already in use in many NMIs, the modular measurement system developed in WP1 will consist of the two macro-setups. The software tool will be composed of specific sub-routines for conducting specific tasks. One part will be dedicated to measurement setups based on two triggered high resolution multimeters, configured as digitizers, e.g. sampling DMMs 3458A, with the possible extension for longer duration measurements. The second part will be based on virtual reconfigurable platforms employing high precision ADCs, e.g. NI 5922 digitizers. The virtual reconfigurable platform will require specific drivers and the control and data acquisition software will be developed in environments such as LabVIEW and LabWindowsTM/CVI. A data processing module primarily intended for numerical computations will be developed using dedicated high-level interpreted languages, such as Matlab and GNU Octave.

Both parts of the system, the digitizer control and data acquisition module and the data processing module, will be integrated using a special software interface so it will appear to the user as one interactive application. As the frequencies of interest are rapidly increasing beyond the acoustic band and requests to further increase the measurement capabilities for power and PQ up to the MHz domain are becoming common, the software tool will provide an advanced method to communicate quickly with the experimental modular measurement setup.

Research within this WP will be focused on a number of topics reported in the following tasks:

1. Task 2.1: Concept for the software structure and integration of hardware platform and wideband scaling devices. Partners involved: CMI, INRIM, FER, SIQ and TUBITAK.
2. Task 2.2: Development of the control and data acquisition module. Partners involved: CMI, FER, Metrosert, TUBITAK, INRIM, JV,SIQ and RISE (SP).
3. Task 2.3: Development of the data processing module. Partners involved: CMI, SIQ, JV, CMI, LNE, TUBITAK, SIQ, FER, RISE (SP) and INRIM.
4. Task 2.4: Completion and description of the software tool. Partners involved: CMI, INRIM, SIQ, JV, TUBITAK, LNE, FER, Metrosert and RISE (SP).

Contact on WP leader:

Bruno Trinchera

Istituto Nazionale di Ricerca Metrologica (INRIM)

Strada delle Cacce 91, IT-10135 Torino, Italy

Email: b.trinchera@inrim.it