Rinnai Corporation's technology development center is located in the town of Oguchi, about an hour's drive from the headquarters in Nagoya, Japan. Rinnai Corp. is a top manufacturer of thermal components, and is also famous for its kitchen and household appliances such as tabletop stoves, tap water heaters, and air conditioners.

We visited the Development Division to speak with Mr. Noma of the Engineering Management section and Mr. Togo of the Kitchen Appliance Testing Lab. Rinnai uses the Kitchen Appliance Testing Lab for developing tabletop stoves, built-in ranges, ovens, dish washing machines, rice cookers, and industrial stoves, and employs the MX100 PC-based High-speed Data Acquisition Unit for performance evaluation of the appliances.

Mr. Togo: "One procedure in kitchen appliance safety evaluation is the overheating test. Tabletop stoves and other appliances are placed on a wooden surface for temperature measurement and allowed to run for one hour, after which we test whether the wooden surface and mechanisms of the appliance maintained a suitable temperature, or whether the temperature exceeded any standards. Thermocouples with copper plates attached are stretched across the surface, and temperature measurements are taken at approximately 660 points using the MX100."
The MX100 PC-based High-speed Data Acquisition Unit supports data acquisition on up to 1600 channels, and comes standard with Ethernet functions that allow for construction of flexible networked data acquisition systems.

Mr. Togo: "We also like its ease of configuration. The removability of input modules and plates with terminals means we can easily remove thermocouples, which is very convenient for periodic maintenance and other tasks."
The MX100's modular construction provides flexible scalability so that users have the freedom to design data logging systems that are best suited to their measuring environments.

Acquired data can be monitored in real time on a PC using MXLOGGER (sold separately). MXLOGGER allows you to quickly setup a high-speed (100 ms), 1200 ch max. data acquisition system.