Does National Instruments produce a DAQ equivalent of an electronic load for fuel cell testing?

[TravisW]

I am trying to consider my options before purchasing an electronic load. I would like to use LabView software to record and analyze my data that I will be generating during fuel cell testing. I was just wondering if National Instruments produced an instrument similar to an electronic load or a couple instruments that could work in combination similarly to an electronic load. I have looked through the available DAQ instruments on the NI website and it seems that they all output signals too low for my application. The fuel cell I will be using outputs voltage from 0-2VDC and current from 0-4A. I understand the internal workings of an electronic load and realize that the best option would be to implement some sort of variable resistor to act as the load in my circuit, then use DAQ instruments to measure current and voltage respectively. The problem is that the range of my current, especially, is much larger than any allowable input range for any NI DAQ instruments.

Any input would be much appreciated. Also if you have developed a testing system for fuel cells or other low power DC sources, please share any knowledge and information about how you went about designing your system.

Thanks

[Ben]

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TravisW wrote:

I am trying to consider my options before purchasing an electronic load....

Any input would be much appreciated. Also if you have developed a testing system for fuel cells or other low power DC sources, please share any knowledge and information about how you went about designing your system.

Thanks

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We used a DC Programmable Electronic Load from AMREL.

WE used GPIB to talk to each of them The loads ley us set constant current/voltage and let us query the current values etc.

Worked fine for us,

Ben

[GovBob]

See:

http://zone.ni.com/devzone/cda/tut/p/id/2759 

And:

http://sine.ni.com/cs/app/doc/p/id/cs-11340 

We have also used an older HP6050A electronic load and controlled it with LabVIEW via GPIB. It worked well in our application.

Hope this helps.

[Paul M.]

Travis, 

The PXI-4130 is actually a really good tool for these kinds of applications:

https://www.ni.com/en-us/shop/model/pxi-4130.html

It can both act as a power source and sink. It is capable of sinking up to 10 watts of power. However, it only can sink up to 2A, so not sure if this will solve your application. Regardless, it's extremely sensitive and fast, so that resolution of data would be useful. We have some customers stacking these together to simulate fuel cell and battery stacks to test controllers.