Abstract:

Educational equipment is a powerful tool used in engineering education to show students the theoretical knowledge acquired in a lesson in a practical and intuitive way. The current European education framework is based on an education focused on the student that reveals the need to teach theoretical and practical concepts with real applications. This way allows a quickly understanding and a better assimilation of the concepts explained in class.

In the field of refrigeration there is the inconvenience of finding commercial, lightweight and portable didactic equipment that can easily be carried to class in order to support during explanations. Current teaching equipment are heavy and large which impede an easy handling and transport.

The main objective of this work is to develop different educational refrigeration equipments for degree and master-degree subjects related with artificial cold production field. Accordingly, different requirements have been imposed: easy to use, light, cheap, easy to carry, 220VAC power supply and provided with a data acquisition system to show and calculate thermodynamic properties (temperature, pressure…) and save data.

The equipment developed are: a single-stage vapor compression system, an absorption cycle based on Platen – Munters system and an refrigeration cycle using air as a refrigerant (Vortex system and Joule-Thomson effect). The data acquisition used to show and save data measured from system is based on Arduino boards that allow an open-platform to increase its versatility.

Keywords:

Educational equipment, education, artificial cold production, refrigeration, vapor compression cycles, vortex, Arduino, Platen-Munters.