Components of T3Ster-Master

The program consists of the following main components:

• the general user interface with
• all the plot functions of the standard T3Ster software,
• additional plot functions with color and line stile definition options,
• function plot manipulation for linear combination of results measured at different channels in a single T3Ster measurement, or initial electric transient correction, or the display of results of many T3Ster projects in a single plot, etc.
• a thermal transient results evaluation engine.
• an import wizard - integrated into the user interface,

The evaluation engine is now an embedded independent executable program with alphanumerical I/O.

The design of T3Ster-Master is based on the multi-document interface (MDI) concept commonly used in many Windows based programs such as development tools (e.g a C compiler). In this concept a project is a set of different project views.

In our case a project is a (possibly multichannel) thermal transient from a measurement or simulation. Its views are

• its parameters (stored in a .par file),
• the raw, unprocessed thermal transients (the .raw file),
• the smoothed thermal transient records (the .rec file),
• results of the evaluation (like time-constant spectrum, structure functions, etc.).

In the MDI concept many different documents (projects) can be open at a time, and any view of any project can be visible. In the basic MDI concept each view is shown in a separate window. T3Ster-Master offers an extension of this concept:: views of the same kind (like structure functions) of different T3Ster projects can be visualized now in the same window - as shown in Figure 1-2.

Besides advanced manipulations of project views and plots, the general user interface provides a run-time environment for the results evaluation engine, which directs its output into a log file.

The import wizard option converts thermal transient curves from almost any source (given as tabulated data in an ASCII text file) into a virtual T3Ster measurement - this way it enables the same kind of results post processing and display as in case of real T3Ster measurements.

Figure 1-2: Structure function views of 4 different T3Ster measurements shown in the same plot window