Development of an automatic system for geotechnical testing

Geotechnical tests are of vital importance in several contexts related to civil and environmental engineering. In this paper, the implementation of an integrated system (both hardware and software) is described. It permits on one hand to reduce the probability of human mistakes often made during manual operations and, on the other, to increase speed, accuracy, and productivity in geotechnical engineering laboratory tests. The software suite was developed in LabVIEW in order to both communicate with different DAQ platforms and to simplify software reconfiguration when laboratory activities change.