ENGS 89/90 Reports

Year of Graduation

2024

Project Advisor

Ulf Österberg

Instructor

Solomon Diamond

Document Type

Report

Publication Date

2024

Abstract

Industrial chillers play a critical role in our everyday lives with applications spanning from cooling medical imaging equipment to cooling pizza dough to cooling manufacturing machinery. Throughout the course of our two-term project, our team developed a test system to verify the functionality of the industrial chillers produced by our sponsor. The test system applies a heat load to the chiller, and measures temperature at the chiller inlet and outlet as well as system flow rate in order to calculate the overall cooling capacity of the chiller. The test system, which is housed on a 32”x34”x60” sheet metal cart, consists of two integrated systems: a plumbing system which circulates fluid between components and the sensor suite which measures relevant qualities of the fluid. The plumbing system or “fluid loop” features three operational modes which can be implemented for bleeding air from the system and operating the system with different types of chillers. The loop consists of copper piping, hoses, an immersion heater and tank, in-line pump, sump tank, valves, and fittings. The sensor suite is composed of industrial-grade sensors for measuring temperature, flow rate, and pressure, with redundancies for all measurements. The sensors interface with a Raspberry Pi, which averages, calculates, and stores the measured data, in addition to graphing the cooling capacity in real-time on a display mounted on the cart. From this data, a performance sheet is generated to provide to the customer as verification of the functionality of the chiller.

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