|
To ensure building materials comply with
fire resistance standards, appropriate testing must be performed.
Such testing is done by accredited organisations using specialised
furnaces and equipment and a very rigorous process required
by the standard. The CSIRO Fire Testing Lab in Sydney is one
of these accredited organisations.
There is a lot of complexity in setting up
and running a fire test. The process may require several days
of work by an entire team. The tests are destructive, dangerous
and enormous amounts of data are collected for them. Tens
or even hundreds of sensors are placed on the specimen to
measure various parameters (temperature, radiation, deflection,
etc.) at various intervals.
Throughout the test compliance with the standard
is assessed dyanmically based on the data collected from the
sensors. The temperature curve inside the furnace much match
the one described in the standard. Failure criteria are used
to assess the pass/fail status of the specimen.
These tough conditions almost impose the requirement
of managing the fire test data and the failure events on a
computer.
Our software allows the storage and management
of dynamic test data, assessment of failure criteria against
the standard, graphical display of the furnace curves and
the various sensor curves, and also allow for historical statistics
and easy test setup based on templates or on past tests.
How it works
The system uses either serial or TCP to communicate
with data loggers which are connected to all the sesors placed
on the specimen and in the furnace.
The data is collected in real time and saved
in a SQL Server database. Various modules inside the software
interpret this data in order to graph it and to check compliance
with the standard. Various compliance criteria can be entered
and used for the failure tests.
Easy to use setup screens allow users to enter
test configurations in minutes that would take hours if the
operations would be done manually.
Multiple charts can display data from various
sensors in real time. The data collected during a test is
used by the operators to generate a test report for the customer.
The object oriented design of this system
allows for further enhancements. For example access to test
data by customers or by the standards body.
The system was implemented at the CSIRO Fire
Testing Lab in 2004.
We don't write our software,
we craft it!
|
