Heat Pump Experiment With a Computer Interface for Control, Data Acquisition, and Analysis

This paper describes an effective, but simple, technique using a computer interface for control, data acquisition, and processing of a heat pump laboratory experiment. A water-to-air heat pump that allows comfort cooling and heating from a single source is used as an experiment and will be incorporated in a Mechanical Engineering Laboratory Course. Presently, the source is the city water. Plans are in place to use a ground source that provides a relatively constant temperature water supply, as low as 45°F. This well-instrumented laboratory teaching equipment allows students to measure temperatures, pressures, flow rate, and power input and then calculate the coefficient of performance of the system and the efficiency of the compressor both manually and automatically. A self-contained Windows-based data collection and analysis system has been developed for automating all the manual functions of a WPH-J Series Water-to-Air Heat Pump from Heat Controller, Inc. This system uses a data acquisition board to read the voltage signals corresponding to 9 T-type thermocouples, three pressure gauges, and compressor supplied power. The data acquisition and control software written in Visual Basic 6 uses 32-bit libraries to control the operation mode, read the thermocouples’ voltages, water flow rate, compressor’s input and output pressure, and supplied power.Copyright © 2002 by ASME