Abstract:

Laboratories in engineering education are essential in the learning-teaching process, as students are actively involved in conceiving problems, formulating hypotheses, designing experiments, collecting, and analysing data, and drawing conclusions about real-life problems.

Science educators suggest that better benefits are achieved when students are involved in lab activities, primarily because labs have the potential to enhance students' meaningful learning, conceptual understanding, and understanding of the nature of science.

The main goal of this work is the design and construction of a remote thermofluid systems lab with an IoT approach, for academic use. The most important characteristic of this project is that physical labs, managed by the same system, are located in two different locations: the School of Industrial Engineering of the UPM (Universidad Politecnica de Madrid) and the University of Guayaquil (Ecuador). This way, physical labs, which are very expensive resources, can be used by different institutions.

The main parts of this system are: two physical laboratories (Thermal Fluids laboratory at the School of Industrial Engineering of the UPM and heat exchanger test bench in the University of Gauyaquil), a Remote Laboratory Management System (RLMS), a set of remote laboratory activities and a Learning Management System (LMS), corresponding to the four layers of the Standard IEEE 1876-2019, respectively, hardware and software (layer 0), laboratories as a service, (layer 1), Learning objects (layer 2) and learning platforms (layer 4).

Regarding to the first layer (Hardware and software), the devices installed in the labs mainly consist of water heater, water closed loop piping systems, including pumps, expansion tanks, air purges, heat exchangers, a cooling tower, sensors, thermal and web cameras and a computer. The virtual instrumentation needed for the project is performed with LabVIEW.

The RLMS administrates the resources and activities of the laboratories, controls access to equipment and the agenda of the activities.
The activities are web applications which allow the students control the laboratory equipment and view measured data.

Finally, the LMS used is Moodle, which is open-source and highly configurable, desirable characteristics for future extensions of the project.

Keywords:

Remote Labs, IoT, Thermal Engineering.