PRESENTATIONS & PUBLICATIONS
Unfortunately I would have to dig up the material and programs, so the exact venues may be reversed and dates are early and late 1990s. Details can be provided upon request.
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In both projects that these papers/presentations describe, I was the sole developer of the software solutions.
Measurement Science Conference - Publication
This paper presented my work of one of my projects in the field of Manometry, (pressure measurement).
Using OEM equipment more advanced than that used at NIST, I automated the measurement of, and (as a world first), the automated generation of gas pressures up to 50 PSI at an accuracy of 0.015% of reading plus 0.005 inches of mercury (inHG).
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Using two interconnected cisterns of mercury, one fixed and one on a precision worm drive, a stepper motor, laser interferometry, thermistors, capacitors, compressors, an automatic patch-broad for opening instrumentation to pressures and vacuum, and various metrology precision instrumentation, the system could measure and generate pressures up to 110 inHG.
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At that time no standards lab in the world was able to generate pressures in this range and accuracy. As the parameter engineer I ordered the advanced hardware, and designed the hardware and software systems.
Leaving aside the intricacies of communicating to the laser, stepper motor, automatic pressure valves, and more, (I wrote these drivers), the software's features included the following:
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Proportional, integrative, and derivative (PID) control of the slewing of the moving cistern of mercury to drive it to a height to match an externally provided pressure source (measurement), or generate a desired pressure (control).
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Five complete test device calibration routines for various types of aircraft instrumentation. These programs had canned presets and/or operator overridable ranges, data density, and repetitions. These applications calculated pressures, drove the equipment, operated valves, performed curve fits, generated tables and graphs, and stored results for device trend analysis.
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All this was controlled via a touch screen interface that I also developed from scratch using mid-level drivers.
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National Conference of Standards Labs (NCSL) - Presentation
This live presentation had to do with my Engineering and Full-Stack development project to use state of the art technologies (on par with those at NIST) to automate and improve the processes to perform temperature measurements with an accuracy of 0.005°C using Platinum Resistance Thermometers (PRTs), a precision resistance bridge (+/- 1ppm), a precision voltmeter, a primary standard resistor, a scanner, thermistors, and ancillary hardware.
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I developed linear and non-linear algorithms necessary for these calculations, used state variables to provide context switching to facilitate multitasking, automatic triple-point determination, logging, and an SQL database for coefficients, configurations, and history.
Live graphics provided a view of the temperature curve and a visual presentation of the triple-point leveling appearance.
The software generated a certificate and a tabular report.
Both the graphic and the table output provided the technician with the ability to select the range for selected output.
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This software application saved the laboratory $60,000 per year in reduced labor.