Design of Portable Device for Rapid Temperature Testing of Concrete Specimens: System Circuit Design Phase

Abstract

The project described in this paper is based on sequential development of a temperature controlled weather condition emulator for testing of concrete samples in different temperature levels at varying period of time. The device can be used to test concrete samples when engineer wants to realize the concrete behaviour under extreme conditions such as cold, very high temperature or drastic drops of temperature incurred in a short period and importantly test for concrete samples during hydration. As an initial phase of the development process, entire system architecture is sub-phased to modular form and hence formulated each module for simulation before realizing of the final fabrication of the actual system. The main objective in this phase is to design the electronic circuit to control the attached thermoelectric Peltier which is the main subject of the heat source temperature controller. Since, mathematical modelling of dynamics of the Peltier systems are not well defined and assured to be highly non-linear in behaviour, controlling of the system is driven to be selected by a fuzzy inference engine. Modelling, analysis and simulation of the system dynamics of the Peltier has already been completed in last phase. Design of electronic controller is detailed in the paper with an experimental performance evaluation plot based on extreme loading conditions of the cooling-heating device. Uncertainty incurred in temperature measurements is also provided with experimental data obtained from the proposed system circuit. Characteristics of the proposed emulator are discussed with given significant constrains. Finally, obtained experimental data from the circuit is satisfied with the expected once therefore, this phase can be concluded for developing an optimized fuzzy controller to control the device as final step of the device.