Design of Arduino Instrumentation for a Thermal Management Testbed
Open Access
- Author:
- Glunt, Jonah
- Area of Honors:
- Mechanical Engineering
- Degree:
- Bachelor of Science
- Document Type:
- Thesis
- Thesis Supervisors:
- Herschel C Pangborn, Thesis Supervisor
Daniel Humberto Cortes Correales, Thesis Honors Advisor - Keywords:
- Arduino
MATLAB
Simulink
Instrumentation
Testbed
Thermal Management
Data acquisition
Controls - Abstract:
- With modern innovations pushing toward faster and more powerful electric technology, increased efficiency in thermal management systems is required. Advanced control algorithms are being developed which are capable of operating these thermal systems at higher efficiency. While simulations are a powerful tool to test a new control approach, it is also necessary to verify these control algorithms experimentally with a physical thermal management setup. For most lab spaces, however, it is not feasible to construct a full-scale thermal load and management system (a complete hybrid-electric vehicle, for example) to test the control algorithm. It is useful, therefore, to have a smaller scale setup of a thermal management system, often called a testbed. Such a testbed requires a data acquisition system capable of reading many different sensors at once and communicating with the controller. The standard data acquisition systems typically cost thousands of dollars and are designed to update at thousands of times per second, which is not necessary or cost-effective for a single-phase cooling loop. This work aims to detail the design of a new data acquisition system, which runs entirely on a collection of Arduino microcontrollers. The Arduinos are in communication with a desktop computer running a control algorithm in Simulink. Various Arduino shields were designed to allow each Arduino to handle a specific task (such as measuring temperature sensors). Some of the low-level control has been delegated to the Arduino as well; for example, the Arduino in charge of measuring flow rate also uses proportional-integral (PI) control to match a desired flow rate refence by actuating the signal to a pump. This new testbed and data acquisition system will allow more complex and powerful control algorithms in Simulink to be physically verified on a single-phase thermal management loop.