One Screen to Run a Research Reactor's Heat and Gas

The problem

A university research lab ran an in-house reactor system heated by two tube furnaces and four heating tapes, with gas fed by two mass flow controllers. Each furnace had its own standalone temperature controller, the heating tapes and gas flow were handled separately, and nothing kept a combined record of what happened during a run.

The researchers wanted one application to run the heat and gas together, follow a planned heating schedule, and capture everything for later analysis, using the data acquisition hardware the lab already owned.

What we built

Software temperature control. We replaced the standalone furnace controllers with software control loops running on the lab’s existing hardware, covering both furnaces and all four heating tapes. Control settings and setpoints can be adjusted live from the screen.

Programmable heating profiles. Each furnace and heating tape can follow its own profile, a series of steps, each with a target temperature and duration, as many steps as the experiment needs. Profiles load from a configuration file and can be adjusted on screen during a run.

A safety relay for the furnaces. If either furnace passes its temperature limit, the software trips a relay. The limit lives in the configuration file, so it can be changed without touching the software.

Gas flow from the same screen. Researchers set the flow on all eight channels of the two mass flow controllers directly from the application. When an instrument reports a problem, the message says exactly which controller it came from.

A complete record of every run. Every temperature (heating tapes, furnaces, and reactors) is written to a timestamped file in a dated folder structure, so the conditions of any experiment can be reconstructed later.

We finished on site, tuning the control loops and testing the whole system with the researchers.

The result

The lab ran its reactor from one screen, with repeatable heating schedules, a built-in safety cutoff, and a full temperature history of every experiment, all without buying new data acquisition hardware.