About the Mass Loss Calorimeter (MLC)

The MLC is a device used to characterize the thermal degradation of materials, specifically the mass loss due to an incident heat flux and ignition event.
The MLC is composed of two major components: The heating coil that heats the sample and the load cell that records mass loss data

Setting up the MLC

Using the AED Panel

The AED Panel is the primary program to obtain mass loss data from the MCL

Go to the Start Menu and find the "AED_PanelE3_V3" program
When open, in the Select Communication mode (bus) drop-down menu choose the "PC-COMport (main channel, RS232 or RS485)" option

After selecting the correct communication mode click on the the "UART (COM_Port)" Tab
On the left there will be three drop-down menus. In the first drop-down menu under "COM-Port", choose the third option.
The other two options may be left as is

With the correct com-port configured the load cell can now be configured
Move from the "Communication" tab to the "Measure" tab
The first sub-tab, "Active Channel", can be used to tare the load cell, setup filters, etc.

The filter drop-down menus are located in the center of the screen
The first drop-down menu under the ADC block can be left as is, the second drop-down menu allows you to select what frequencies to pass through. For our purposes 0.25Hz is sufficient.

While still under the main "Measure" tab, select the second sub tab: "Measure32_setup"
The "Mode" block can be left alone. Under the "File" block switch the Mode from "OFF" to "automatical"
The second box represents the number of samples to be taken. The third drop-down menu represents the period at which data is taken.

After selecting the data writing criteria the data can be written to a file
While still under the main "Measure" tab, select the third sub tab: "Measure32_display"
Click "start" on the bottom right (Note: after clicking start the button name will change to "stop") and a pop-up window will appear to allow you to change the file name
Enter the desired file name and click "save". Once the "save" button is hit the program will start recording data at the specified rate and time specified in the "Measure32_setup" section

The measured value will appear under the ADR0 block and the amount of time left in the data acquisition will appear next to "File active:" near the bottom of the window.
To stop the program, either after data acquisition has finished or mid-way into data acquisition, the "stop" button can be pressed

Power on the heating coil by flipping the top switch to the right. The Temperature Controller should already be configured to a certain control setting.
To change the desired temperature (green in the above picture), simply use the arrow buttons on the bottom of the temperature controller.
The red numerals indicate the current temperature of the coil and the green the desired temperature.
Temperature is displayed in Kelvins. THE TEMPERATURE SHOULD NOT EXCEED 1073 K. This is the maximum operating temperature of the heating coil.
Documentation can be found by accessing the barn/Projects/Mass Loss Calorimeter/Component Manuals/M2943.pdf