The design for the pipe fitting asemblie that connects to the air compressor was designed with ¼” NPT brass fittings with ¼”-⅛” adapters when needed to connect the J-Type thermocouple and the gage pressure sensors. The best way to go about designing a pipe fitting asemblie is to first figure out what sensor if any need to be included in it and what your start and termination conections need to be. From there it is best to look at either McMaster car or Grainger to find what types of conections there are and what you may need. If you use McMaster car you can get 3D modelt tha you can put into Inventor to visulize your assembly before you purchase that parts.
For getting temperature data on the heat exchanger and outlet to the first stage of the air compressor we used K-Type thermocouple wire. For using any type of thermocouple it will need to be run through an amplifier to gather data from it. We used in combination a MAX31856 and AD8495 amplifier from adafruit. The MAX board was used because it accepted the use on any type of thermocouple and the AD8495 was only able to be used with K-Ype thermocuples. The benefit of using these boards from adafruit was that on their website they provide wiring diagrams and sample code to get them working quickly.
The pressure transducers that are being used are MSP300’s they produce a output voltage of 0-.1V which means that we needed to get an instrumentation amplifier so that we could read the data from it. We originally tried to use a sigle op-amp to boost the voltage signal but we werent able to get this to work. We ended up using an instrimantation amplifier board that Lafayette College Mechanical engineering department produced. If this were to be approached again we would have liked to bought a pressure transducer that had a built in amplifier that produced a signal voltage from 0-5V.
For the processing of our data we opted to use an Arduino Mega instead of LabView. This was because Arduino was a system that we had prior experience with and It used open source software. This made finding tutorials and useful information on how to program a lot easier. It also had the benefit over labview of being cheaper. For processing the singla that came from the pressure transducer we used a two point calibration wich we got an example from adafruit for. It was planed to also use on for the thermocuples but we decided not to because the probes were alread attached to the system and would have needed to be removed to prefore the calibration. It was also deemed unnecessary because the thermoucoples produced a constant reading and reated to changes in temperature and all that we required was to get the temperature difference that was observed.