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Valley Fabrication's field shuttle.
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Looking inside Valley Fabrication's custom ThermokLogger box.
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The wheel with a ruggedized ThermokLogger mounted on it.
Valley Fabrication of Salinas, California builds specialized agricultural equipment. One of their products is a tracked produce shuttle that is designed to bring pallets of fresh produce from the fields to the edge of the road where it can be transfered to conventional trucks. The shuttles work hard in knee deep mud and other harsh conditions.
Valley Fabrication's vehicles use hydraulic motors and planetary gearboxes to operate the large rubber tracks. To increase the product lifetime they have instrumented a shuttle to measure hydraulic system parameters. One of the parameters they are interested in is the temperature in the planetary gearbox. Because the only mounting location is on the wheel they needed a recording temperature measurement system that could be entirely self contained and withstand a harsh operating environment. APRS World had a solution for them. In less than a week we developed a Thermok that is battery powered and logs temperature to a Secure Digital™ card.
Formula SAE Exhaust Gas Temperature Monitoring
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2004 ISU SAE engine on dynomometer with thermocouples in exhaust header.
LCD screen on Thermok showing the exhaust while idling.
The Iowa State University Formula SAE team develops their own intake, exhaust, and engine control package each year. The basic engine is a Kawasaki Ninja ZX6R 600cc 4-cylinder motorcycle engine. The team has developed their own intake and exhaust systems. They spend approximately 200 hours each season on the engine dynometer tuning and testing their engine package.
A Thermok monitors the temperature of the exhaust gas temperature for each cylinder. Standard transition junction K-type thermocouples are inserted into the exhaust header approximately 1.5 inches from the exhaust ports on the engine.
In this application a bare wire thermocouple was put in the center of a domestic gas oven while baking muffins.
This was a fun little project that has actually been quite useful in further baking efforts. It is now known that the hysteresis in the oven control swings to approximately 50°F above the temperature set point and never goes below the set point.
