AUTOMATIC TEMPERATURE CONTROL USING LABVIEW TO MAINTAIN COMFORT ZONES

摘要

Temperature control is one of the key factors in maintaining comfort levels in work or residential environments. It is also crucial in several biochemical, metallurgical, and industrial processes. Although there are traditional methods of maintaining control, such as thermostats that use thermocouples to gather information, they are limited because of their crude design and lack of operational accuracy. Ion this work, we use the concept of a feedback control system to achieve accurate temperature control. The system, essentially, consists of a hardware and software integration approach to maintain a desired temperature. The hardware operates as a constant current source driving a feedback operational amplifier circuit whose amplification varies with the value of a thermistor. The output voltage of this system is converted to a digital value by an analog/digital converter card. The software, created in LabVIEW, converts the voltage into a corresponding temperature and is compared with a preset value, which generates a Boolean value. The Boolean value triggers a set of relays which either turns on a heater or a fan, depending on whether the ambient temperature is less than or greater than the preset temperature. This paper will document all results of the testing, observations, challenges, and methods of accomplishing the tasks discussed before.