Carlisle

Carlisle Brake & Friction, a worldwide company leader in designing and producing brake, clutch and transmission solutions, needed monitoring software for a test stand in the Research and Development laboratory. 

Software solution for a dynamometric bench

The challenge

Carlisle needed monitoring software for a test stand in the Research and Development laboratory. The test stands in question subjects disk brakes to continuous high stress and acquires torque signals and pressure, temperature and rotation speed values from the monitored engine. Usually, every testing session involves complex sequences of parametric tests.

All those data recorded during the tests have the purpose of helping Research and Development technicians to analyze and typify the monitored samples.

The biggest obstacles to finding a solution could be summarized as follow:

• A big amount of different kind of data to be acquired and managed;
• The request for real-time monitoring of several parameters, which is a hard task from a computational point of view and required a great optimization of LabVIEW code.

The solution was to equip the R&D laboratory with the most reliable and versatile software in order to support the team of engineers during the data analysis and the units classification.

The solution

T4SM has worked out a solution able to connect to the Carlisle engine in a best-performing way using a customized interface for data monitoring.

In order to solve the compatibility problem, T4SM’s software acquires signals thanks to the NI board 6024: it communicates with a PLC Siemens S7 which is the handler of the complex oleodynamic circuit serving the engine.
The tests sequences and the status of the tests progress are saved in the MS-SQL database.

Then the recorded data are saved in files used for the automatic generation of reports and excel spreadsheets.