Remote refrigeration system experiments for control engineering education

The extension of the traditional hands‐on laboratories to the Internet, in which labs are remotely accessible to the users to perform experiments, is still a challenge for education in engineering. In this paper, we present a remote refrigeration laboratory that allows students, trainees, and engineers to get acquainted with control aspects of mechanical refrigeration systems. Thanks to a university–industry partnership, the remote lab is hosted in an industrial site and it can be accessed by means of a client–server communication and an ad‐hoc designed LabVIEW‐based user interface, that allows to monitor and control the plant. The user can conduct both open‐ and closed‐loop experiments on a typical vapor compression cycle refrigeration system, testing different control architectures that range from standard regulators to data‐driven PID controllers.© 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Comput Appl Eng Educ 25:430–440, 2017; View this article online at wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/cae; DOI 10.1002/cae.21810

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