TRANSPUTER-BASED UPGRADING OF A DIFFERENTIAL SCANNING CALORIMETER

The high-performance and concurrency features of transputers and a mix ed-grain approach to parallelism are exploited to provide an existing differential scanning calorimeter with real-time computational capabil ities which can be easily increased by addition of transputer-based mo dules. The effectiveness of our design is tested by investigating the behaviour of aqueous solutions of a biomolecule, whose time-dependent heat capacity is evaluated and visualized while the experiment is in p rogress. The reported hardware/software details can be profitably used to update different existing instrumentation.