A flexible data acquisition and control system is used for undergraduate instruction and projects in a thermodynamics and fluid mechanics laboratory. The system consists of four IBM PC-compatible computers, each equipped with an internal data acquisition board and a hard disk on which reside several compilers and a programmable graphing and data analysis package. Two of the machines are laptop (portable) computers and two are 386-based desktop computers. Laboratories currently included in the engineering curriculum will be revised to incorporate real-time data acquisition, graphing, and data analysis using the computers. These laboratories include the analysis of combustion engines, heat pumps, wind tunnel measurements, solar energy collection, heat transfer studies, soils analysis, and investigations of liquid flow systems. The equipment also has the capability of producing output control signals that can adjust in real time the physical parameters of processes under investigation.
