Our Team's goal
was to provide the Thermal Engineering Laboratory with a sophisticated piece of
equipment that effectively demonstrates the refrigeration cycle, air
conditioning properties and components of an HVAC system that are taught in both
Thermodynamics and HVAC. Additional heat transfer experiments to
supplement the lab's current heat transfer experimental equipment were part of
our team's goa
l
as well. We focused on using R-134a since students study it extensively in
their Thermodynamics courses.
Besides the main goals set forth by our advisor, we also felt driven to enhance this system by providing enhanced data acquisition equipment and a user-friendly design that offers additional visual aids, such as a direct view of the refrigerant flowing through the pipe. Instead of using standard pressure gauges and thermometers that would be found on a typical refrigeration system, we chose to use thermocouples, pressure transducers, and a flow meter that are connected through a data acquisition board to a PC running LabView. The LabView interface we designed allows students to monitor the flow rate of the refrigerant as well as the temperature and pressure between the main components of the system, as well as allowing the user to switch between SI and English units during operation.
Read our final report. Requires Adobe reader - get here for free
Some pictures of the system both during construction and completed. Use the arrows to scroll and read the captions below.
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Different configurations were tried to determine which was the most convenient for operation and allowed for visual inspection of all components. In the foreground is the condensor coil and compressor.