Polymer insulator fog chamber project: Data acquisition system development

A computer-based data acquisition system has been developed to analyze the long term performance of polymer insulators using a fog chamber. The leakage currents flowing through the insulators under test are sensed, conditioned, digitized, processed, displayed, and finally stored for further analysis. Based on the requirements of the application, a comparative study of different data acquisition packages was conducted to select the appropriate software. Virtual instrumentation software, DASYLab, was determined to be the most suitable option for this application. An icon-based program has been developed to classify the leakage current pulse counts using bins, and to compute cumulative charge, and maximum and minimum current pulse values. It also provides real-time display and Fourier analysis of the acquired data. The data is reduced and stored in files on a hard disk for post-acquisition analysis.