To give visitors an idea of PCRL's location and the surrounding area, below is an aerial photograph of Madison, Wisconsin. The isthmus and the downtown area (left) are bounded by Lake Menona (top) and Lake Mendota (bottom). Some of the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus is shown on the right, and Lake Wabesa can be seen in the distance.
Below is an overhead view of PCRL's transient dynamometer system. This figure shows the engine, loading pump/motor, and associated hardware located on the bedplate. This is the highest bandwidth transient engine dynamometer of its size in the world.
The following picture shows that equipment that is used to control the dynamometer's hydraulic pressure and load the engine. The VOAC pump/motor directly loads the engine, and hydraulic pressure to the device is controlled upstream by the Nachi electronically controlled pressure relief valve, and downstream by the two Moog servovalves. The 3-stage valve controls the low-bandwidth and high flow modulation, and the 2-stage valve controls the high-bandwidth modulation.
PCRL utilizes a flexible engine control system based upon the Southwest Research Institute's (SwRI) Rapid Prototyping Engine Control System (RPECS) design. The figure shows the various boards and layout of the control hardware that comprise the PCRL engine control system. The ribbon cable in the upper left hand corner interfaces to a computer that runs the engine control algorithms in real time; C programs running in the QNX real time Unix operating system.
The controllers, sensor amplifiers, DSP processors, and transient emission analyzers are housed in an instrumentation rack in the DynoLab. The following figure shows the rack, and describes the instrumentation located in it.
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