We shed light on the fourth industrial revolution inside the research laboratory
When we talk about industry 4.0, the fourth industrial revolution, we talk about applying new technologies in factories and production processes to improve the obtained results. These are new technologies that we use to advance automation and to transform traditional factories into smart and more effective ones.
The key technologies allowing us to create this smart factory concept are:
- Computer vision
- Collaborative robotics
- Augmented reality
- Artificial intelligence
- Internet of things
- Cybersecurity
- Big data and cloud computing
- 3D printing
Anyhow, not only in the industrial environment, but also in research laboratories complex measurement setups incorporate several devices and components, which need to be simultaneously controlled and exchange data. LabView is the worldwide standard software for such laboratory automation and for this purpose Bruker offers comfortable virtual instrument (VI) interfaces for its R&D spectrometers.
The VIs control the OPUS software to start a measurement task of the research spectrometer. After the measurement, results will be transferred to LabView for further analysis. Via the LabView instance further laboratory equipment can be controlled and connected. That enables advanced LabView users to embed the Bruker research spectrometers into a sophisticated measurement environment.
Bruker offers VIs for all measurement modes such as transmission, reflection, DRIFT and ATR. Even time resolved experiments i. e. Rapid Scan and Step Scan can be started and evaluated in LabView (see below 3D data plot in LabView). More interesting details and expert contact are available here.
