ExperimentControl for TRES
Basic information
Project ID: AEE-2017-23
Students: Borys Plyenkov, Henri Varjotie, Kang Jiao, Qianqian Qin, Yi Zhang, Esko Honkala
Project manager: Henri Varjotie
Instructor: Noora Isoaho
Other advisors:
Starting date: 5.1.2017
Completion date: 29.5.2017
Objective
The main objective of this project was to build a system for assessing the temporal resolution of electrochemical sensors. The system consists of liquid tanks, sensor housing for three electrodes, pump, valves, microcontroller and PC software. The system was required to be connected to third party potentiostat device which would collect data from sensors. The collected data would then be sent to PC software from which the data can be downloaded and displayed in a more user-friendly manner.
The system was required to support at least two different liquids and to change fast between these liquids. The system was also required to be easy to use and to have a proper user manual with troubleshooting guidelines.
Similar project was done last year. However, their measurement results had a lot of noise in them. Therefore, the main objective of this project was to filter away all the possible noise in the measurement results by enhancing the system.
Summary of results
The project name ExperimentControl for TRES (Temporal resolution of electrochemical sensors) comes from the fact that the system is a test setup for assessing the temporal resolution of electrochemical sensors. Temporal resolution defines the accuracy of the sensors with respect to time.
In this project, a three-electrode setup was used for assessing the temporal resolution. First, the electrodes were placed in self-designed sensor housing. Next, two solutions were run through the sensor housing, one at a time. Changes in the current response and the rise time between the current plateaus give information about the temporal resolution. The current response is measured with a third party potentiostat which is also controlling the potential in the electrochemical cell. The objective of this project was to develop a system which enables user to easily measure the temporal resolution.
The outcome of this project is a system consisting of hardware and software. Software is the brains of the system and it controls the hardware based on parameters the user sets in the user-interface. Software also controls the potentiostat, which is doing the actual measurement, and obtains the measurement data from it. From the data, the software plots a current versus time graph in the user-interface. The software also enables user to download the data as a CSV-file (comma separated value). From the measurement data, the user can calculate the temporal resolution of the electrodes/sensors.
The system reached its objectives by being easy-to-use and providing quite noise-free measurement data. The system has automated and manual modes which gives the user possibility to do more variable test runs. The system is also quite simple which makes it modifiable.
Video
This video was made by Kang Jiao and it was presented in our highlight talk during the Final gala of this course. The video is a summary of this project and contains material of building the system and performing the final testing.
ExperimentControl source code
The source code for our User-interface and hardware control software can be found in GitHub.
Documents
Appendix 2: Final test results
Appendix 3: ExperimentControl - User manual