Calibration Requirements and Good Practices for Modular Instuments

A monitoring, measuring, or testing activity with test instruments is only useful and effective when the measurement results are reliable. To ensure the reliability of the measurement results from the test instruments, a calibration must be performed. Every electronic device needs a calibration schedule to verify its performance. As with traditional instrumentation, modular instruments should be verified and adjusted in a consistent manner to ensure its performance and to maintain its accuracy over time. However, unlike traditional instrumentation, modular instruments have additional requirements and considerations that need to be accounted for in order to perform a proper verification and adjustment process. As you may know, modular instrumentation consists of a combination of chassis, embedded controller and modules, and each module needs to be considered and maintained in order to obtain a consistent and reproducible process. Additionally, a software application is necessary in order to communicate with the instruments and obtain the results. The impact of these system aspects is not always considered. In this paper, calibration requirements and considerations that may influence the quality and confidence of the results for a modular instrument calibration process will be presented. Good Calibration Practices for modular instruments are defined and explained in order to considered and applied during the process. These good calibration practices also can be used by end users to ensure the quality of their measurements.