Second Order Mechanical Online Acquisition System (R.U.B.E) - 2006 ASEE Conference

P.Avitabile, T.Van Zandt, J.Hodgkins, N.Wirkkala

A second order mechanical system is operated in an online, internet controlled LabVIEW experiment with impulsive and displacement input excitations. The system displacements and accelerations are measured using multiple measuring devices. The selection of transducers spans the range of poor transducer sensitivity, noisy measurements, inadequate resolution and clipped signals. The students must collect and process the data to numerically integrate and differentiate the displacement and acceleration measurements. A variety of different issues must be addressed in order to cleanse the data of real-world measurement contaminants; filtering, smoothing, bias adjustment are a few of the issues that need to be addressed.

The measurement system forces the students to address issues related to real-world measurements which are tainted by a variety of different contaminants. In addition to the actual measurement system, a virtual measurement system is also available to study the individual effects that may contaminate the measurement system in a controlled fashion.

The actual measurement system has variable mechanical parameters—it changes every time it is operated so that no two sets of data are alike (variable input, variable mass, variable stiffness). This forces each student to process his/her own data, as it will be slightly different from data sets collected by other students. The RUBE (Response Under Basic Excitation) is described along with the supporting tools that assist the student in the evaluation of the acquired data.

Assessments of the first three semesters of the project clearly indicate that the students enjoyed this hands-on project and clearly felt that they understood the material in much greater depth as a result of the project.

A PDF file will be available for downloading shortly

In the meantime, e-mail Peter_Avitabile@uml.edu for copy of paper