The software from the MTS hydraulic press employed for asphalt materials testing at the Road Reseach Laboratory of the UPC-BarcelonaTech acquires detailed data every certain number of points (typically, every 100 cycles). For each cycle acquired, the software registers approximately 50 data points (1 data point each (freq.*50)^1 seconds). This produces large data files where meaningful data is partitioned in blocks of 50 data points, with blank and descriptive rows containing strings in between. The fact that the number of data points acquired in each cycle fluctuates between 49 and 51, complicates the automatization of computing the main parameters that describe each cycle (force, displacement amplitudes and delay between the two of them, i.e., phase angle).
This script automatizes this process. This script is tailored to the most common data file structures in the Road Reseach Laboratory of the UPC-BarcelonaTech, but it can be easy adapted to different column distributions, names, units, etc,…
In the current version this script can deal with two different data file structures and returns the ‘specimenprocess.dat’ file. The result file is a comma separated file where the following values for each recorded cycle are reported: Cycle number, piston displacement amplitude in mm, force amplitude in kgf, hysteresis loop area in mm·kgf, phase angle in the first quadrant in degrees , maximum and minimum displacement during the cycle in mm, maximum and minimum force registered during the cycle in kgf, and loading rate in mm/min (speed of the piston peak-valley).
Sample data files with the two data structures the script accepts can be found on the following repository: https://github.com/ramonbotella/MTS_data_process_Python/