Integrated Management of Experimental Research- and Meta-Data for Fan Test Rigs

Test Rig & Instrumentation

The availability of descriptive metadata is mandatory for the long term usability of experimental research data. This paper introduces a modular data model based on the HDF5 file format that is applicable for the typically heterogeneous and evolving experimental setups. It enables uniform storage of related measurement data in different processing stages and corresponding machine actionable metadata in the same file. On this basis a software design is proposed that streamlines data storage, access and processing by means of object oriented programming, limiting the need for customized data acquisition and processing software per test rig configuration. Furthermore, application examples for typical fan test rigs are presented and discussed.