Thermocouples reading...

[NGiLuzzu]

Dear All,
in order to monitor and record temperature values during cryogenic and fire testing of valves, at the moment we are using a 16-channel signal reader (model SR630 by Stanford Research Systems: see

http://www.srsys.com/html/body_sr630.html).

Now we would like to replace it with a computer-integrated data acquisition card and a simple software, able to obtain final temperature graphs from the reading of 5 or 6 (type T or K) thermocouples.
We looked into National Instruments and LabView products, for instance, but it sounds like they're too complicated (and expensive) respect to our needs...
Does anybody have any suggestions?
Many thanks, 'NGL

 

[FredGarvin]

The cost and ease of use is going to depend greatly on accuracy and other items like scan rate. I used to use a lower cost item made by HP we called a data bucket. It was an 8 channel input that had a decent scan rate and could write data to a .csv file that could then be manipulated in Excel. It was a relatively low cost item. I honestly haven't looked for one in quite a while though.

There are other data acquisition products out there. Did you try companies like Omega?