Welcome To Our Project

Project Background

In 2018 Intempco designed, built, and tested an environmental chamber to be used to calibrate the humidity sensors that they build in-house. They made good progress but were not able to achieve accurate humidity measurement, and the stability of the humidity measurement needed improvement. As of April 2018, the system was achieving 3% stability and +/-13 % accuracy in the humidity measurement. In addition to this, it currently takes about two hours to come to steady state. The humidity measurement must be +/-1% accuracy and stability, and the accuracy of the temperature sensor should be below +/- 0.2 degrees Celsius in the finished design. The system should also reach a steady state (+/-1%) within 30 - 50 minutes.
Intempco currently has 3 prototypes in various phases of development:
Initial prototype (Mark 1) - Complete
Second prototype (Mark 2) - Testing phase
Third prototype (Mark 3) - Final Design phase

Design Objectives and Requirements

Based upon discussion with the client four design objectives were developed for this project. Within each design objective key requirements were identified and revisited periodically throughout the duration of the project. These requirements have unfortunately not all been verified due to the team not having enough time to produce a final prototype. This final prototype would be needed to verify the requirements highlighted in red. Although, not able to be verified the team is confident that these requirements will be easily met once a prototype is produced, as they were considered throughout the entire design process and revisited often.

Testing and Modifications

To gain a good understanding of the initial prototype, as well as to prove that it would be capable of achieving accurate temperature and humidity measurements extensive testing was completed throughout the first semester. 
This testing was critical to moving forward with design decisions for the final prototype development during second semester. Also ensuring that the two-pressure principle was a reasonable method to use to obtain relative humidity. 
Through testing and modifying, the team was able to achieve system stability after 40 minutes, RH stability of +10% of set-point, and increased monitoring capabilities throughout the system.