ARC Technology Solutions

Client: A large and successful privately held company that is looking to expand from its traditional area of expertise into the flourishing fuel cell industry.

Situation: ARC’s client was seeking an engineering firm that was capable of developing a system for testing fuel cells. The goal of this project was to design and develop a fuel cell test system that is scalable, compact, user friendly and has greater process control. The customer’s current lab environment where they conduct their testing was not automated and extremely unreliable. The main goal was to provide a rack mounted enclosed software system where the client is able to test a configurable amount of units under test over a long period of time. The client also required software that was capable of providing PID control.

Solution: The solution was based on National Instruments CompactDAQ platform due to its low cost, easy expansion and hot swap capabilities. The customer is currently using this test system in an R&D environment for life cycle testing. The CompactDAQ platform addressed both areas of the customers concern, flexibility and reliability. The platform is both compact and low cost allowing for easy expansion, up to ten fuel cells of different configurations to be tested with the system. The CompactDAQ was mounted inside of a rack mount chassis housing the temperature control modules. Connection to the UUT’s, sensors, pumps, and valves was via the connector on the side of the chassis. This solution utilizes ARCs Ethernet based relay control system to control the DC power and polarity reversal relays. Reliability was achieved through both selection of components and intrinsic features. The use of mechanical relays has been minimized in ARC’s design. All of the CompactDAQ modules are hot swappable allowing long term testing to continue on unaffected UUT’s while repairs are made to the still operating test system. Omega PID controllers provide temperature control and each controller provides an Ethernet interface. The control software was written in LabVIEW version 8.2. The client was pleased that ARC was able to keep the project in scope as requested. Although ARC did provide a few additional features to the client, the project was delivered in a timely manner.