Design of Data Acquisition System for Real Time Parameter Analysis in Industrial Process Plants

This paper describes a microcontroller-based data logging system to record temperature, pressure, level and flow for data acquisition applications. The system is simple to use, requires no additional hardware and allows the selection of amount of data and the time intervals between them. The collected data can easily be exported to a PC computer via a serial port. DAQ (Data Acquisition) is simply the process of bringing a real-world signal, such as a current, into the computer, for processing, analysis, storage or other data manipulation. A Physical phenomena represents the real-world signal you are trying to measure. In order to optimize the characteristics of a system in terms of performance, handling capacity and cost, the relevant subsystem can be combined together. Analog data is generally acquired and transformed into the digital form for the purpose of processing, transmission and display. Rapid advances in Personal Computer (PC) hardware and software technologies have resulted in easy and efficient adoption of PCs in various precise measurement and complex control applications. A PC based measurement or control application requires conversion of real world analog signal into digital format and transfer of digitized data into the PC. A data acquisition system that performs conversion of analog signal to digital data and the digital data to analog signal is interfaced to a PC to implement the functions of a measurement and control instrumentation applications.