YOU MUST WEAR EYE PROTECTION AND CLOSED TOE SHOES 

AT ALL TIMES WHILE IN THE LAB ROOM

DATA SHEETS 
The instructor or GTA must sign your experimental data sheets for every experiment performed before you leave the lab. 
You must provide a copy of the data sheet(s) to the GTAs before you leave the lab.

Otherwise, the lab report to be submitted will not be accepted for grading.

You are strongly encouraged to download these Manuals and Support Files to your local computer. The Additional Information section is for reference purposes. LaTeX Resourcessection provides links to get started with Latex. 

Manuals

  • Lab Introduction and Report Writing Requirements
  • Impulse Turbine
  • Viscous Flow
  • Response of a Physical System
  • Air Drag Force
  • Strain Measurement – requires analysis in prelab
  • myRIO Mechatronics,  Mechatronics Survey and NI myRIO Essentials Guide
    Make sure you complete and bring with you the Mechatronics Survvey
  • LabVIEW and Strain Gage Sensor Integration
    • This experimental manual is from the University of California at Santa Barbara. You must understand the theory for the wheatstone bridge. You will be given resistors which will be approximately 120 Ohm. 
    • You will not be using an oscilloscope but you will be using a multimeter and create your own LabVIEW VI (prorgam) for data acquisition. 
    • NOTE: The day before you will perform the Strain gage LabVIEW interface lab, if you would like to understand how a breadboard works, you can borrow a breadboard, some cables and a multimeter from the TAs the day before perfoming the lab (their office hours or during the lab hours).
      You must return them the day and time of the lab for the next set of students. If you do not return them you will not be allowed to perform the lab.
  • Design of Experiments (no manual)
  • Magnetic Levitation System – Demonstration time permitting 
  • Inverted Pendulum System – Demonstration time permitting 
  • Air conditioning – Demonstration time permitting

Support Files (in Microsoft Excel)

Additional Information – Files

  • Analysis of Experimental Uncertainty is very important and integral part of experimentally obtained data. An article describing how to treat experimental uncertainty is provided for you. The article , apperead in the Journal of Fluids published by ASME in September 1991 titled Editorial on Experimental Uncertainty.
  • Another objective of this course is the writing of Another objective of this course is the writing of formal reports. An article that appeared in the IEEE Potentials magazine (Volume 28, Issue 6, Date: November-December 2009, pp. 10-15) provides guidelines for writing an undergraduate engineering project report by M. F. Akorede. Use the information in this article as you see fit for the purposes of this course and your other courses. 
  • In wirting formal engineering reports it is importnat that you reference all sources of information to avoid what is called plagiarismAn article in The Wall Street Journal on August 15, 2006 discusssed plagiarism and its consequences. You are strongly adviced to read and understand this article. 
  • Reference to plagiarism, the UTA library has a web-page(http://library.uta.edu/howTo/plagiarizing.jsp) with relevant information and you are advised to visit it and consult it when in doubt.
  • Introductory LabVIEW Resources: The National Instruments (NI) web-page has a wealth of information on getting started with NI software and hardware such as LabVIEW and data acquisition devices. http://www.ni.com/gettingstarted/labviewbasics/
  • There are many textbooks available for anyone interested to get more familiar with LabVIEW such as Introduction to Data Acquisition with LabVIEW by Robert H. King published by McGraw-Hill. This book is bundled with LabVIEW 8.5 Express software that allows one to perform the exercises in the book and get familiar with the software.LaTex Resources

In the past students inquired about writing software apart from Microsoft Word and Open Office. If you are interested in using TeX (LaTeX) to write your reports, A little more info is available in the Reference Materials

I strongly encourage you to visit wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TeX) or CTAN (http://www.ctan.org) for more information and links.

You could use Texnic as the front end interface ( http://www.texniccenter.org/) or Texmaker (http://www.xm1math.net/texmaker/) but you need to install also MiKTeX (http://www.miktex.org) along with some other utilities such as a Postscript viewer. You can obtain GSview (gsv49w32.exe) from http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/gsview/get49.htm and you can obtain GPL Ghostscript 8.60 (gs860w32.exe) from ghostscript

Introductory Latex Tutorials:

Andrew Roberts developed tutorials that provide a step by step introduction on how to develop documents (http://www.andy-roberts.net/misc/latex/).

Stephen J. Eglen has a short example on how to use latex for scientific reports (http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/eglen/texintro). Eglen’s downloaded files are available here as a zipped file. 

Latex for Humans at https://latexforhumans.wordpress.com/category/writing/. This page has plenty of getting started resources and tips.