Development of Monitoring System of Furnace Temperature for Fire Resistance Test

In Indonesia, fire safety requirement in building in Indonesia prerequisite that a building structure must able to resist fire at a certain time, which is represented by fire resistance rating. As the only one fire laboratory in Indonesia, furnaces in the laboratory are quite old and operated manually both in monitoring and controlling. This study aims to develop a monitoring system of temperatures of furnace and unexposed surface of specimen test for the fire resistance test. The developed system consists of three main parts: hardware, electronics, and software. The hardware system included sensors thermocouple type K and LM35, power supply, and a case-box. Electronics system used Arduino Mega 2560 as main microcontroller and other components such as MAX 6675, etc. Software system managed data communication between the furnace and human through graphical user interface (GUI). Writing code in Arduino was carried out using Arduino IDE while GUI was developed using Microsoft Visual Studio. The results demonstrated that the developed system was able to measure and read the temperature of both the furnace and specimen test in real time. The both measurement results could be monitored through graphical user interface (GUI), including the average values of both results. The acquisitioned data were able to convert into excel file (.xls) and stored them into memory card. Nevertheless, further development is required particularly to control the fire in furnace automatically.