FERRARI - Climate Wind Tunnel

One of the most significant projects of the Eurins experience is undoubtedly represented by the creation of the data acquisition system in the climatic wind tunnel of Ferrari GranTrusimo.

This project, which has gone through successive stages and has been characterized by the constant synergy between Eurins and Ferrari, has arrived at a realization of impressive potential, entirely based on hardware and software components at the state of the art, in which the distributed intelligence paradigm he found full expression.

The system developed by Eurins incorporates all the features necessary for a complex test scenario such as a wind tunnel, that is: ability to dialogue with control systems and dedicated instruments, communication on the most widespread industrial field buses, acquisition of analogue data from sensors through acquisition and conditioning cards, interrogation of remote units in the network.

The acquisition system is based on a distributed architecture, in which several intelligent units, connected via Ethernet, perform specific tasks, exchanging information continuously: data acquisition, control, movement, display and recording.

The acquisition and control software culminates in a simple yet sophisticated human machine interface, installed on a personal computer, in which to customize, with maximum freedom, visualization environments, complex mathematical channels, test cycles, data recording modalities.

The communication tasks with dedicated instruments and tunnel control equipment are carried out entirely by an embedded PXI unit, an industrial standard of great reliability and high performance.

The analog data acquisition from the field sensors and the control units is entrusted both to the same PXI, and to the distributed real-time acquisition units, with high channel density and highly evolved intelligence, of the EOLO-cRP family. The latter offer the particularity of being used for data acquisition both in wind tunnels and in road tests, thanks to the ability to record significant amounts of data on integrated non-volatile memory.

The analogue channels, intelligent and configurable, allow the connection to different types of sensors, also offering the necessary conditioning, through simple software configuration. The characteristic of leaning on different acquisition units, in an alternative and complementary way, together with the presence of "smart" channels, gives the system versatility, modularity, as well as of course a large number of channels. The acquisition system, thanks to the modularity and versatility described, is completely open to future developments and the integration of new hardware and software modules.